The player progresses through Dear Esther by exploring an uninhabited Hebridean island, listening to a series of voiced-over letter fragments to a woman named Esther. The narrator's identity is not specified, but there are suggestions he is Esther's husband and that she is dead, killed in a car accident.[3] These monologue fragments are triggered as the player reaches certain areas on the island and are chosen by the game semi-randomly, meaning that different playthroughs generate slightly different stories as certain readings inevitably are omitted while others are added. In his letters, the narrator refers to several other unseen characters. One, a cartographer named Donnelly, charted the island in the past. The narrator refers to Donnelly's book frequently as he traverses the island.[4] Another character the narrator mentions, Paul, is suggested to have been the driver in the car accident which killed Esther.[5] The narrator speaks also of Jakobson, an eighteenth-century shepherd who lived on the island and whose life the narrator details.[6]
