Nightmare Fuel / Dear Esther

• The island, while beautiful with its Scenery Porn, can also be equally as creepy. There's no one on this island. The only sign of life is the one bird you see flying overhead early on. The buildings have long been abandoned, their contents within moldy and discarded. Even the music can be eerie, especially in the caverns with the echoing chamber-choir chorus. The only modern element to the island is the aerial, and it, too, becomes haunting once you realize what the narrator is going to do once he gets up there...
  • Special shoutout to the caverns. They are one of the most dazzling areas of the game- and also the creepiest, with its dark tunnels, fluorescent lighting, and the reveal of the underwater car accident.
• Sometimes, in the distance, you can see a shadowy figure lurking ahead, rushing past or even in the water's reflection. When you try to get closer to it, however, it vanishes. We get no indication of what these figures are or why they are there on the island. The narrator does bring up ghosts a lot, however...
  • There are six of them. A man, two women, a cowled figure, a hooded man and a reskin of the faceless corpse from Half-Life 2. Yes, the one that was modeled on an actual corpse.
• The narrator arrives on this island either washed ashore or on purpose after multiple visits to live like a hermit. No matter what, however, the narrator intends on making this island his final resting place.
• Depending on the playthrough, the one who was drunk-driving during the incident that killed Esther was the narrator, meaning he blames himself for Esther's death even more than he does in other playthroughs.
• The later parts of the game sees the narrator grow increasingly incomprehensible, blurring fact and fiction, ideas and thoughts, Bible passages and chemical formulas, until he becomes nothing more than a rambling lunatic on the verge of collapse. And it's not just because of the Purple Prose (although it doesn't help).
  • Made worse by the fact that he had also injured his leg to the point of becoming infected. He is making his way up the mountain with nothing more than his iron will and lots of painkillers, for the purpose of throwing himself off the aerial.

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