A house isn't always a home.
You have no excuse not to play Gone Home. To me, this is a genre defining piece of independent interactive storytelling, and is fully worth the $20 price tag.
The Chinese Room's Dear Esther goes free on Steam to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this foundational title.
Eh.
I mean free is free, but I found this to be a boring slog.
Not to mention this remasters actually made the game look worse in multiple areas.
I did quite like their A Machine for Pigs and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture though.
On Valentine's Day a decade ago, Dear Esther went from a Source Engine mod to a full-fledged indie game, catalyzing the "walking sim" genre. How does it measure up today?
"The China-based indie games publisher Secret Mode and Brighton-based (the UK) indie games developer The Chinese Room, are today very pleased to announce that they will celebrate the tenth anniversary of "Dear Esther" by making the genre-defining 2012 narrative exploration game free to download from February 14th to February 15th via Steam." - Jonas Ek, TGG.
Seriously? A 3 hour long walking around simulator is "fully worth the $20 price tag"?
It is an amazing experience and is well worth $20. Hell, I spend more than that on an hour-and-a-half Bluray movie. Interactive entertainment doesn't play out the exact same way each time you play it, so it inherently has more replay value.
I read the plot on Wikipedia and saved $20.