The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Short adventure game with very nice graphics and good story. Puzzles are easy, but fun, because of the innovative way they are presented. I have mixed feelings concerning the gameworld. It's made in a "open world" kind of way and looks amazing, but feels very empty. Some areas are just dead ends, but the game forces you to explore everything to not miss a puzzle (you have to solve them all). A little bit more optional content would have made exploring less frustrating. A big letdown are the savepoints. The game only saves when you completed a puzzle. If you are working on more than one puzzle at a time, finish one and exit the game your progress in the unfinished puzzle is lost. + graphics + story, atmosphere + innovative puzzle system - frustrating savepoint system - no progress indication until the very end - many places are just empty in the gameworld

I'm not sure what to think of this game. First thing is the graphics, the forest you see at the beginng is a masterpiece. I think it's the best looking nature in game that I have seen. Then the story which is interesting enough but not great either. There are moments with great atmosphere though. My biggest problem with the game is, what they called "no hand holding". This basically means you will get stuck often. Probably the creators didn't like the modern games where there is an arow always telling you where to go. Ok, fine but here they don't even tell you how your 'power' works - you stumbe upon a trap, you can click on it and some shape appears. Then you find a secondd trap, there are 2 shapes now. What now, should I keep looking for more traps? Are we done? Go further? Yo don't know that you have to find all the clues and then you can use the 'sense'. And the hardest stuff to solve is of course in the beginning, you have to find a small rock or some tiny handle which is quite far away from the scene. I ended up using a guide for the first puzzles, then it was ok once I knew how it was supposed to work. Running around the forest aimlessly looking for basically anything is not my cup of tea.

Gorgeous graphics. Some puzzles, more or less interesting so far (I haven't finished). Shit save system - it only saves after you complete a puzzle, and when you load it resets your position. Quite bad for a game that invites you to explore. And considering how long it has been in development, they could have spent some time on saving the full game state...

This game, or better described, experience started out promising, but went off the rails (pun not intended). The good: - Very pretty - Sedate (mostly), exploration. The bad: - Autosave only. I said "enough is enough" when there was a hang and I would've had to go a fair distance and through an area that made this game run like molasses on my computer again. - "Narrative that doesn't hold your hand" shouldn't mean "we're going to put something way out of your way in a large world without even a compass" - No explanation of the word cloud. It really isn't that intuitive guys, explain it please. - The maze. I have no base objection to mazes. Add some twitch to it that doesn't exist elsewhere in the game? No Thanks.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter falls under the genre of interactive fiction; sometimes labelled as "walking simulators" but that's a poor description. Interactive fiction bears more relation to a novel or back-to-back episodes of quality television than video games. That might be one of the reasons why critics seem to like this style of gaming more than hardcore gamers. I'm a fan of this style of game as my gaming touchstones are old school adventures which were driven by stories and characters. But even as a fan of the genre, I found Ethan Carter to be one of its least engrossing entries. It's certainly beautiful; the Redux version is probably the most successful attempt to replicate a real world experience in a fully rendered 3D game. Reflections of light in puddles on a bridge, a soaring view from a railway bridge cutting into the valley and a stunning sunset on a lake surrounding by snow capped mountains were all wonderful moments. The problem with Ethan Carter is that the story doesn't feel embedded in this gorgeous vista; instead is seems to sit on top of it as a collection of mini puzzles and vignettes which delight in their obscurity. Function needs to follow form in narrative fiction, and the problem with Ethan Carter is that its beautiful world is filled with sketches of people; ciphers rather than rounded characters. There's a lingering sense that any discovery you make during the game might be a dream, a lie or inconsequential. Ethan Carter is filled with metaphor and sub-text, but narrative fiction really lives in exploring genuine human interactions. Creating truly emotional, human stories without having to spend precious resources rendering characters is a problem all narrative fiction games are trying to solve. Gone Home has been the most successful, and I feel Firewatch has probably found the best mechanic. Ethan Carter is not as well conceived as either of these; it's a beautiful world and I dearly wish that it had a heart to match.