Dear Esther, the haunting adventure first developed as a Half-Life 2 mod at the University Of Portsmouth by Dan Pinchbeck, is now in beta ahead of a commercial release early next year.
Pinchbeck's game was the subject of some controversy after he announced it would be released commercially through Steam, with the modding community believing it should be given away for free.
However, extensive work has been done on the game, with Pinchbeck porting it to the Portal 2 engine and Robert Briscoe, a former DICE artist who worked on Mirror's Edge, giving it a thorough graphical overhaul and Jessica Curry composing a new soundtrack.
"We've started discussions with Valve about a launch window, and this is looking very likely to be either the end of January or the beginning of February," Pinchbeck writes on the Dear Esther site.
"There's still a bunch of stuff to be done - lots of testing on various machines, fine-tuning the environment and audio, getting all the surrounding work done that goes along with launching a game but isn't the actual build itself. But it's very close - we're pretty comfortably at beta (without Steamworks) so it's a major milestone for us."
In Dear Esther, players travel across an island, guided by voiced monologues from the spirit of the titular Esther. Pinchbeck has previously described the game as being about “Grief, loss, guilt, faith, illness… But also love and hope and redemption.” It's been submitted for consideration for the Independent Games Festival (IGF) and will also be presented at GDC. For more, including new screenshots and a snippet of Curry's soundtrack, follow the source link below.
Source: Dear Esther