Posted on: October 24, 2015
zqt43
Verified ownerGames: 35 Reviews: 5
Uniqe
Clever, beautiful, haunting, humane. This is a lovingly created experience for the more thoughtful, introspective player, who really wants to truly visit a place - and that place just happens to be the deepest and dearest memories inside someone's head. Ether One is something of a throwback. "Immersive" used to be one of the hottest videogame buzzwords in the early 90s, its heralds developers like Cyan, of Myst and Riven fame, but these days, as long as the game is visually realistic and may be comfortably navigated and interacted with, it is taken for granted. Nobody remarks about it any more; as a culture, we've got the knack of suspending our disbelief if only the graphics are stunning and mechanical gameplay is smooth. Ether One is different; it pushes far beyond reliance on mere technical merit. True immersion means building an entire world - one of history, culture, personal relationships, emotion, depth - and Ether One is without recent comparison there. It's a game about love and life, sadness and death, about work and play, about the cold dank smell of a mineshaft, and the taste of cider on May Day - and, above all, what that meant to someone. This game is so immersive, it damn well holds your head under - despite a relatively low polycount and fairly simple textures (more on that below), it feels more truly real than any game I could name in recent times. It makes you feel a connection to everything in it; this is a place you truly inhabit, and I haven't felt myself so drawn into a game for years. The downside: it's been my consistent experience that the most creatively and artistically innovative games tend to suffer on technical execution a bit, and this game is sadly no exception. The large levels are seemingly not well optimised, despite their relative geometric simplicity, and bring my computer to a juddery crawl, though it has comfortably rendered much more complex scenes in other titles. You'll need quite a beefy machine to play this one.
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