The Chinese Room's interactive storytelling experiment Dear Esther is getting rebuilt - again - in a new engine.

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Environment artist Robert Briscoe revealed the news on his blog , explaining that he's been working on a Unity build for the past few months after running into countless issues with Source during the outsourced development of the Linux and Mac ports. Due to licensing problems and huge middleware bills, the team could not continue to support the ports once the contractors' terms had finished.Briscoe says that all the drama left him feeling "anxious, not just about the possibility of further ports, but about the future of Dear Esther in the years to come."The solution? Rebuilding the entire game in Unity. The change of engine, Briscoe says, will allow greater reach to other platforms, eliminate the team's need to scour the world for Source Engine developers, and facilitate clean-ups of the existing Mac and Linux ports."For now, the plan is to work towards a solid, high quality, Linux and Mac build, and then eventually PC. At some point we’ll release betas for our existing Humble Store and Humble Bundle customers to evaluate and test, and when we’ve got something that reaches a quality we’re happy with, we’ll scrap the flakey old builds and look at getting everything up and running across all platforms on Steam."Briscoe assures readers that no permanent changes will be made until The Chinese Room is "100% sure" that the new Unity build is ready and that gamers are happy with the transition.For the technically-minded amongst you, Briscoe has since posted a follow-up post on how exactly he's doing the whole Unity-porting thing.Dear Esther began life in 2008 as a Source Engine mod, before being rebuilt from the ground up for its commercial release in 2012. We reviewed the 2012 release highly.This Unity build will be Dear Esther's second entire overhaul.

Katie Williams is a freelance writer and games journalist. You can follow her on IGN . She also tweets at @desensitisation and hopes that one day, a bird will tweet back.