[MeechMunchie]

I never said it was a bad experience. I've stated repeatedly (and implied in the bit that you just quoted) that it's a perfectly adequate experience. But that doesn't make it a good game, any more than Two Souls, or any other movie-with-button-prompts you care to mention.

There are plenty of ways to make your game interactive without giving any actual agency over the outcome of events. Gone Home gives you freedom over what you choose to investigate, and the order in which you explore the rooms. It leaves some things hidden, so they require a degree of spatial awareness to find. Even something as linear as Half-Life breaks up the path with open areas, puzzles and combat that the player has to invest a little effort to navigate.

More to the point, games where the interactivity is divorced from the story usually aren't narratively focused in the first place; their quality lies in their other mechanics, and the player is encouraged to explore those rather than the story. Dear Esther, on the other hand, is nothing but a story. If someone criticises the fact that you can't interact with that, it's simply because the game doesn't have any other features to interact with. And without any interaction at all, you're simply left asking, "Why is this a game?"

Interactivity is more than the strength of games; it is games. Spacewar!, generally considered the first video game, was nothing but a few specks on a monitor. But you had a knob, and you moved the speck around. It wasn't a movie, and it wasn't a book. You were the player, and you could do something. You had an objective. "Games are interactive" is not a tradition, it's a definition. Having a specific story you want to tell is not an excuse for turning the player into nothing but a pair of legs and a W button, yet it's that solitary key that makes Dear Esther a game at all.

Unless you're implying that Dear Esther's gameplay would stand on its own without the writing and art... which would be a pretty bizarre statement to make.