Image via The Chinese Room

Award-winning narrative exploration game Dear Esther will be made free on Steam for its tenth anniversary, per a press release from UK-based developer The Chinese Room earlier today. The game (ordinarily priced at $9.99 USD) will be available to download from its Steam page from February 14 to 15. The release is besides existence used to promote The Chinese Room'southward upcoming game, Footling Orpheus, due out on March one.

Originally released as a free-to-play Source engine modernistic, Honey Esther was officially released on February 14, 2022. The game sees players wandering an island they are given no proper name for, only tasked with finding alphabetic character fragments effectually the isle written by an unknown man to his equally unknown, only deceased, wife. Each letter fragment corresponds with the area in the map it was constitute in, grounding these fictional memories with visual elements for players to feel themselves. As the game progresses, players get to meet more of the story between the couple and other residents of the isle, with the game ultimately leaving the player to figure out what happened for themselves, with multiple playthroughs of the relatively curt narrative being rewarded with unlike audio fragments providing dissimilar perspectives on the same event.

The original mod and terminal version of the game are both laurels winners in their own rights, with the mod winning the All-time World/Story laurels at IndieCade'southward Contained Game Awards, and the terminal game capturing several awards, such as Excellence in Visual Arts at the 2022 Independent Games Festival and Best Utilize of Narrative at the Develop Awards, as well as v BAFTA nominations the aforementioned year.