#Dear esther music mod
#Dear esther music Ps4

You encounter magical, dreamlike occurrences – an armada of miniature paper boats or the lit candles that litter the landscape. You come across abandoned structures where the rotten wood splinters, exposed to the elements by crumbling stonework.

You walk across a Hebridean island as the sun is setting, the purple grey of the sky bleeding into the heather, the native flora kept close to the ground by the bracing coastal winds. The game was revolutionary upon release, eschewing traditional notions of interactivity – shooting, jumping, climbing, driving – in favour of something more streamlined. Four years later it was re-released on Steam, and now, a further four years on, a remastered version is coming to PS4, Xbox One and PC.Īnyone who’s played Dear Esther will know just how different it is to other video games, contrary to Curry’s belief.

#Dear esther music mod

Dear Esther was originally released in 2008 as a free to play mod for Source, the game engine behind Valve’s acclaimed Half-Life 2. “I thought all games were like Dear Esther.” This is what Jessica Curry, head of independent development company The Chinese Room and the game’s composer, told me the last time I spoke to her. Lewis Gordon finds out the inspiration behind Curry’s distinctive soundtracks.

#Dear esther music Ps4

This autumn, a remastered version of Dear Esther is being released on Sony’s PS4 system, and Curry is gearing up for a special performance of the soundtrack at the Barbican in London. Join Meena Shamaly on today’s Game Show for the music of Dear Esther and other games of reflective exploration, as well the quiet musical moments that happen in between the action.Award-winning composer Jessica Curry not only heads up the development team behind acclaimed indie games Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture and Dear Esther, she also composes the games’ unique, haunting scores. Curry asks the string quartet to be minimalistic, the piano to stand alone, and the singular human voice to float underneath the literal poetry of the story being spoken. The game invites you to explore an uninhabited island by yourself, while the story of a man and his wife is revealed through spoken fragments of the letters he wrote. So Let Us Melt invites you into a fairy tale cosmos to be explored across a time span of six million years, traveling upon the sound of a sweeping orchestra and a blissful choir.ĭear Esther is probably the sparsest experience developed by The Chinese Room, with the sparsest score from composer Jessica Curry. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs invites you to a haunted London in 1899, amid four soloists sometimes clashing in horror, and sometimes locked into beautiful harmony. Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture invites you into a small English town in the 1980s whose residents have mysteriously disappeared, along with the prayers and hopeful songs of choirs. It’s a company whose games are more about the experience of the world you’re in, and the story your environment is telling.Įach of the four games The Chinese Room have made invites you to discover a different kind of world, each set against the music of Jessica Curry.

One thing, however, differentiates her from most in-house composers: she co-founded the game company itself. In a game like Dear Esther, the whole video game experience is a journey of lone exploration, poetic prose, and the pulse of a string quartet.īritish composer Jessica Curry spent many years of her career as the in-house composer of game studio The Chinese Room. Not every video game is about fighting enemies and solving puzzles.