The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

It only has autosave. I played for 15 minutes or so and got quite a bit done. Then I had to quit the game. It warned me that progress after the last auto-save would be lost. 'Fine,' I thought, 'I've been playing for a while now, how much progress could I lose?' There was no indication of it, in any case. I made sure to have done something significant before quitting, just in case. That generally triggers an autosave in the games I've played that use them. When I started the game again I was right at the beginning. In Psychonauts 2, which also uses autosave, I hardly ever lost more than seconds and the most I ever lost was 2 minutes of play. It also warned me upon quitting how much playtime I'd be losing if I went through with it.

It has beautiful graphics but the story is not thought provoking enough for a walking simulator.

In the Vanishing of Ethan Carter you're a detective in charge of rescuing a young boy who mysteriously disappeared in an "open world" where you'll have to collect clues to resolve puzzles in order to know what happened in Red Creek Valley. On the paper this sounds really cool. At the first moments, the game shows great art design to the player as it continues through the whole game supported by a good voice acting. When you find a puzzle you need to search for all the clues/items invovled in the scene than you need to guess the chronology of the case. But the game is really easy and you'll only find 5 or 6 puzzles in the game, furthermore I had the feeling that the get easier as the game goes on. Yes panoramas are greats but if I want to walk in a forest I just go walk in a forest. It just took me under 4 hours to complete the game you better know it, glad I bought it for less than 5€.

With minimal gameplay elements and pretty graphics, this game puts you in the shoes of a paranormal investigator. There are a total of 10 "puzzles", or better said stories, in which you uncover step by step what happened to Ethan Carter. Not only that you are not forced to solve any of them (except the last one), you might actually miss some because sometimes they aren't in your main path. Rating: If there's something strange / In you neighborhood / Who you gonna call? Recommendation: the game is a short and atmospheric visual novel with minimal gameplay, are you into that? http://pixelloot.com

I remember seeing a promotional video about the mechanics of this game in mid-2014, and being very excited to see how this came would look and play. I feel that its marketing died down and faded into obscurity or at least enough to make me forget about it. But leave it to gog to bring up a game I forgot about. The description is clear about what this game sets out to accomplish: they want to capture the essence of detective games while giving you a visually stunning setting and eerie atmosphere. If I were to describe this game by genre, I'd call it a first-person point-and-click adventure game. What I loved most about this game is definitely the visuals. Every texture for nearly everything is high-definition, and looks wonderful on my 1440p monitor. They succeeded in creating an "almost" photo-realistic engine to present their beautiful world. The music also adds beneficial tones to the game, and deserves recognition, but unfortunately, my love ends there. The game features a massive-MASSIVE map that has so many places to explore... You'll feel exhausted just sitting in your chair. I constantly found myself straying from the paths they so carefully planned out, only to find myself walking into a mountain or "wall" of rocks, preventing me from exploring further. This game suffers from a painfully tedious linearity that I would describe as a "walking simulator". Even at the VERY BEGINNING, the game explicitely tells you it "doesn't hold your hand" and then puts you on a track that funnels you into the next area. The puzzles are somewhat challenging, but I'd say it's more about trial-and-error than cunning-wit. You'll walk around, find something, then wait for the game to point you in the right direction. I'm running out of space, so all I have left to say is that you should try this game if you want a short story in a visually-fantastic world that you don't mind spending half you time getting from point A to point B. The walking is kinda nice, but gets old quick.