Last week I talked about Dark Rock Games with Adam Griffiths.

Adam brought my attention to Dear Esther, a Half-Life 2 mod that Dark Rock was called in to work on by Dan Pinchbeck.

Dear Esther is now available here along with a movie here.

Dear Esther puts traditional game technologies to innovative new use. Rather than a story told through the medium of games; a 3D environment has been constructed to disperse a story throughout. The user navigates the environment, triggering audio fragments of a narrative which, together with visual clues and codes embedded in the world, build to create a story which is inherently constructed around the innate slippage of meaning and fragmentary nature of interactive experiences. It is a fusion of original text, music and world within an existing media framework.

Reading more information on Dear Esther is really quite interesting, I just wish my PC was working so I could check it out. I recommend you go out and give this a whirl and see what it is all about.