The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Overrated garbage. It's a look around and look at this big word we've built. The technical achievement is amazing, but the rest of the game is so bad. Not worth it unless its like $3.

Ethan Carter is a, as another reviewer said, walking simulator. It's the type of game where you're thrown into an environment and tasked with figuring out what happened in it. There's no real gameplay to speak of, rather you're tasked with triggering cutscenes and voiceover, to progress the story along. If you like such a mechanic, you might like this game. But for me, I never enjoyed wandering aimlessly in a sprawling environment, where most of the environment is unimportant - wallpaper, and the story I'm discovering is set in stone. Nowhere in this game is there an attempt to get the player invested in the story. Investment is rather a happy accident. If the story was structured in a different manner, I might have been invested, or at least pulled along from discovery to discovery, but the story as it is is fairly vanilla. It's a story type I've seen done elsewhere before. You do get some beautiful empty repetitive scenery to trudge through, but seeing as all you do is walk, its beauty is unimportant. It doesn't help that it all looks fake. I guess lighting effects are to blame, but playing a game like this, you constantly know you're playing a game. It's the problem of 3D - the more it tries to be realistic, the easier it is to spot its flaws. Also, for a wander-around-aimlessly game, you're punished for wandering around aimlessly. You'll constantly encounter invisible walls, and the game only offering a checkpoint system seems to be done in order to save you from wandering aimlessly. Being able to save whenever would have been nice, but I guess it saves you from getting stuck. Regardless of it all, I have a hard time taking the game seriously when my character has that stereotypical gruff detective voice, and the ability to deduce out of thin air a-la Sherlock Holmes. But liking mysteries, I rarely enjoy when the supernatural is introduced into them. I prefer logic, and a supernatural element takes it away.

A gentle, eerie, unsettling mystery story that slowly unfolds as you explore a gorgeously rendered world. This is not for those seeking a lot of action; Ethan Carter is more meditative than anything. But its puzzles are challenging and satisfying, and it's compact enough as a story to not be overly tedious. There is an unfortunate backtracking element; if you miss any puzzles (and like other reviewers here I failed to grasp the basic mechanics of the game until much further into it), you'll have to revist areas that are incomplete. Strangely, Ethan Carter makes it possible to instantly warp to the areas you need to complete ... but not warp from them to anywhere else, leaving you with some lengthy treks back. Still, walking through this world, with a splendid OST for companionship, is quite restful and enjoyable, and I found myself more grateful than anything that, in contrast to the frantic games most of us played, this one slowed me down. A spoiler-free comment on the story: Some have found the ending gimmicky, but this might be a mistake. I think as you interpret the events of the game, you should use as your lens the motif mentioned along the way that there are "stories within stories." I suggest not taking the ending as a literal description of events, but a literal event followed by a child's imaginative attempt to heal their division in their family (through tragedy). A spoiler-filled comment on the story: I take the ending to be that Ethan has spent the day working on the Prospero story, which we enact as Prospero, and each of the murders are Ethan imagining punitive outcomes to his cruel family. We witness them in real time mocking him and chastizing him at the end, but when his mom swings the lamp, I take it that this is Ethan imagining yet another tragedy (much like his other stories) that would make his family regret their actions towards him. It's almost like a revenge story.

The premise is simple. Find Ethan Carter, a boy who has vanished somewhere in an abandoned mining outpost called Red Creek Valley. As you explore the small settlement, the woods and mountains surrounding it, you will immediately find that nothing about this case seems right. You will encounter strange and supernatural occurences, echoes from the past telling of a bloody hysteria ensuing among the locals, the lines between past and present, here and there, dissolving. It's a modern adventure game. Most puzzles aren't challenging but the game doesn't play itself either. Like with many so-called walking simulators, which Ethan Carter is decidedly one of the better of, the biggest challenge you are faced with is putting together the pieces of the overarching narrative in your mind. The game does not take you by the hand though (It even tells you this very clearly). If you want to entangle the mysteries that bind Ethan Carter to this place you have to pay attention to the details and stray from the beaten path. You won't be given a truckload of exposure at any point either. Some questions remain ambiguously unanswered til the very end. Both sound and graphics are among the best you will ever see in a videogame. Stunning visuals and soothing melodies (written by Witcher composer Mikolai Stroinski) draw us into the lovecraftian world of Red Creek Valley, realistic sound design and well-written dialogue make us stay there. A lot of the assets are at their core scanned copies of real world objects or buildings, artistically retouched to create this pinnacle of surrealism. If any of this sounds appealing to you, you should not wait any longer. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, at a playtime of around 5 hours, is short but worth its money and a perfect first game for the Astronauts. The Sleeper must not wake!

The fact is that the less you know about this game before you start playing it, the better. So I won't spoil it for you. It definitely is not for everyone. Buy it if you like - story-heavy games - narratives - it when a game does not hold your hand and assume that you are too young to play the game - Heavy Rain Don't buy the game if none of the above is true. If you don't know your answers to the four points above, then wait for a high sale-percentage and get the game without a chance of losing much money.