Dear Esther vs Gone Home

In the past few weeks, I played two short, experimental games: Dear Esther by The Chinese Room, and Gone Home by The Fullbright Company. The mysterious vibe, the focus on storytelling, the surprisingly fine audio and visuals and the undeniably unorthodox character of both games make it impossible to not draw comparisons, so that’s exactly what I’ll do.

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Frozen

It’s been years, or so it seems, since I last watched a Disney cartoon. It’s still weird to see the 3D models and connect the computer-generated imagery and modern-like impressions to what I remember adoring as a kid. The last one I really got into was The Lion King, I believe, and that was back in the 90s. Things have changed, and I don’t mean only the visuals. The themes, the references to Real Life, the humor – it’s all new, and, to borrow my own words from Fruit from Palaven, it makes me feel old.

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Altered Carbon

I read Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, and liked it a lot. It’s a noir-ish SF novel set in a somewhat dystopian future where, thanks to the discovery of the relics of a technologically advanced alien civilization on Mars, humanity managed to spread over a number of distant worlds, and, more importantly, work out a technology of digital human storage which allows one’s mind and memories to be saved after the death of the body, and downloaded into another. Takeshi Kovacs is an ex spec-ops soldier who gets killed in the prologue and then ‘re-sleeved’ into a new body when hired by one of the most powerful people on Earth to solve a bizarre murder mystery. It’s through the challenges this tasks presents for him that we learn both about the setting and Tak’s not-exactly-amiable character.

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