The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

I love immersive games. Dear Esther was an almost spiritual experience for me and I was hoping VoEC would be similar. However, where DE was all about piecing together the puzzle by just wandering through the beautiful landscape, VoEC is about investigating, finding items of interest and reading notes. Just like DE, VoEC has some of the best graphics I've ever seen in any game and sets a really strong mood which is a good start. Sadly enough, the gameplay is flawed and relies heavily on its looks. As beautiful as the music and the graphics are, the game basically revolves around you running around and finding things you can interact with. "Looking" at these will cause a bunch of words to pop up helping you out - for places where items are missing, it tells you what item needs to go there, for example. A rather strange thing considering the game tells you at the start that it won't hold your hand. And yes, puzzles really are that shallow with the game spelling out what you need to find. I enjoyed some of the animated cut scenes for their artistic beauty but I can't help but feel that the dev tries to dazzle to hide the weaknesses in other areas of the game. Heck, you end up exploring pitch dark mines and other places which leaves you begging for a map, a compass or a flashlight. Finding a pick axe in a pitch black mine is just one example of why they feel painfully absent. So you spend ages running around, wondering if you missed anything, backtracking, combing through every cranny, "just in case". Not fun. The pace and focus of the game feels muddled as well. There's huge areas of the game where nothing can be found and then areas crammed full of stuff. It feels like some of the areas you run through are empty because the dev wanted to let you soak up the atmosphere but it doesn't work because you keep looking around in case you missed something. Bottom line? Great but flawed experience with poor pacing. I loved the idea but the execution ... next time better?

Vanishing of Ethan Carter is very visually appealing and has nice soundtrack, but is very short, rather bland and hardly even a game. Despite game telling you that it's a narrative experience that doesn't hold your hand, you'll stumble on the puzzles just by walking around, and if not there is a handy map near the end. The puzzles are really easy and there is only a few of them - in fact you'll probably spend more time walking around than actually doing anything. It's barely few hours of gameplay. Despite the game being that short, I've hit a few bugs, although nothing game-braking. There is also lack of proper save feature, and the autosave (checkpoints, really) is not particularly good, which is disappointing for a PC game. Story, at least for me was not particularly exciting. It felt nothing more than competent, even bland at times. There was not enough narration to actually care about the characters you saw in the visions. It didn't help that I did see the 'twist' ending coming from miles away (at least from mine gate, at least), and I think it didn't work particularly well. Especially within the context of the story - but let's avoid spoilers. TL,DR: Wouldn't recommend.

This was supposed to be a 6/5 score. The work done with textures and model optimization is simply mind bending. I don't think it can be surpassed in the next years, but I hope the same level will be reached again, hopefully in a free roaming open world RPG. Mechanics are also extremely polished: again, from now on I expect every detective game to have an interface built around the principles used here. Paradigm shift, 6/5. What went wrong? Autosave. Are you a person with preciously tight and sparse free time? Well, the Astronauts don't give a damn about you. I am one of them and if you guess I am writing on a tablet from the White Throne because this is all the time I have, I am not blemishing your mental image of me with the truth. Ok, (e.g.) Bioshock Infinite had the same autosave-only approach, but you would expect that a small company, especially one sensible to the DRM problem, would know better. Spoiler: they don't. -1 star. The plot. I am ok with the "Scooby Doo endings". When the WTF moments, however, are too many, when you can't detect plotholes anymore because hey, WTF event, when you have to complete an "investigation" that goes straight against all the aims of the protagonist but it's okay because, you guessed it, WTF event, well, I am out of it. -1. Yes, it is short, yes, the "gameplay hotspots" are few and far between, yes the plot could be improved, yes you end up not minding, because the world in which you move is astounding. 4/5, a pity because it could have been an incredible game and it ended up "only" being good.

The game environment is truly stunning. It is a graphical masterpiece, period. But the gameplay is horrible. It is supposed to be an immersive puzzle-solving game, except that the player is not introduced to the gameplay nor guided in any way. What I expected is that some information gathered early on will make sense only later in the game. So I left the initial puzzles unsolved without realizing they are stand-alone puzzles and can be solved here and now. The result is utter frustration when going back and forth around the map trying to figure out what to do. In the end I had to take a look at a solution to learn that in fact puzzles do not depend on each other and also find out where they are. It turns out I discovered most of the puzzles except that I didn't understand what the game developers wanted me to do. Once I realized what the game is about it became quite fun. Another thing to complain is saving the game only at checkpoints located after solving a puzzle. Given that the player is supposed to immerse in the gameplay and wander around to explore the world this is a horrible decision leading to more frustration. When I first played the game I wandered around for well over two hours, exploring places in the game. When I started the game for the second time I had to start from the beginning because I have not reached any checkpoint. Just horrible. So, a 5 for graphics and a 1 for the gameplay, gives a final score of 3 stars.

This game is gorgeous to look at. The game design is atrocious. The level design is a long hallway that forks. Follow one fork, and there is nothing. An empty room, nothing to see here. Backtrack, go the other way, and there is an obvious "puzzle" with weird, frustrating gameplay mechanics that just make it hard to reach your goal. The game calls this "not holding your hand," but it is just lousy design. Tons of backtracking. The story and writing are pretty bad, the ending is not too far from "It was all a dream!" Just a huge disappointment all around. At least it was over in just a couple hours.