The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Of all the "walking simulator" games that have come out over the past few years, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is the one I most wanted to try in that genre. I didn't know much about it, besides the gorgeous screenshots and the somewhat surreal imagery (like the astronaut running through a primitive forest). Now after having tried it out, I've got to say, snidely referring to this style of game as a "walking simulator" is honestly pretty accurate, but there's still a lot of cool stuff to be experienced here. The gameplay is pretty simple. All you can do is walk/run around the somewhat small map, and interact with objects. Your goal in each area is to piece together items in such a way as to recreate the murders that took place there, and then you psychically have some story revealed to you through cutscenes, and you move on to the next area. You can also crouch, which annoyed me because I had no idea you could do that, and you only actually have to use the crouch button once in the entire game. I don't want to talk about the story too much because the game is rather short (7 hours for me) and to say anything about it would be too revealing. The game is made by its atmosphere, and it does a pretty good job with that for a while, but for me, the atmosphere fell apart when I reached the "end" of the game, and then had to backtrack to complete other tasks I didn't know I needed to do in order to actually see the ending. Also, although I didn't encounter any bugs or glitches per se, it did lag on my computer, and I was usually worried something would go wrong, since you can't actually save your progress, and the game doesn't seem to really like autosaving. Not a whole lot of information is communicated to the player, which I understand is part of the atmosphere, but made me wonder at times if I was doing something wrong, or if the game was broken. If you're interested in a somewhat creepy, definitely atmospheric walking simulator it has my reccomendation.

The game looks beautiful but the story and puzzles are really meh. And a "walking simulator" without good story is just not worth it.

Such a beautiful game in its original version and gorgeous over unreal engine. A short story with a unique telling mechanism in the game play, good puzzles and a great narrative. It doesn't hold your hands but holds your attention. A recommendation to play as as a gift.

The story is pretty small and you can probably finish it in about 5 hours. The game is really immersive with beautiful landscapes that you can walk around and explore. There is not much to do, other than interact with objects and solve a few puzzles. You have to rely on the autosaves but since you can't really die it doesn't matter much. A quiet and sad game to while away an afternoon with!

This game looks beautifull, sounds great and the gameplay is very smooth. I've struggled a little bit in the beginning, as the game doesn't state clearly what you should do. But after I've figured this out the rest of the game (3h only, which is a shame) went perfectly fluent for me. Story is great, world presented is believable, gameplay enjoyable. If only it was a little bit longer...