The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

I gave it a try, since it was on super-sale. And it's almost playable, I maybe get 15-20fps, but that's too low even for me. So if anyone else is on an old midrange i5, with integrated HD 4600, don't buy! It looks incredible though, even with almost all settings on low, and 720p resolution. So can't blame anyone (but myself) that it isn't playable on my system (even though Alien Isolation and Far Cry 3 and Life is Strange works decent enough to play). Game seems great though, after just trying for a few minutes - that dense forest, incredible viewdistance, immersive high quality sound. No reason to try and refund this, I'll save it for some future pc upgrade. Have loads of games to play until then though... (yes, on my old HD 4600 IGP!).

While I went into this game expecting very little, I have to admit it pleasantly surprised me. The amount of content for it's current asking price seems a little steep, but what is here ranged from good to exceptional, carrying the experience side of a game much better then many games who live off it. While I would recommend waiting for a good strong sale before picking it up, that is more about quantity then quality as I can personally attest I finished the game in about 3 hours trying to do everything I could find. What is here is superb, it just doesn't last.

First of all the game is beautiful! (I actually looked up the inspiration for the setting on the game's wiki page.) I play a lot of point-and-click, puzzle, and/or detective games and this one both has interesting mechanics (such as putting past events in sequence) and I felt like the game actually respected my intelligence as there were no hints to be able to figure things out. Even if it took me awhile to get a few locations/puzzles right, I never minded running around the beautiful landscape.

The game itself is quite atmospheric. However in its current form, the save system leaves a LOT to be desired. You cannot manually save and you will have to rely on auto-saves which just does not trigger as often as you would like. Apart from this and a cheapo "zombie" scare, games good.

I beat this game in under a couple of hours, and that was with having to do three "mysteries" over because the auto-save system didn't actually save anything the first time I played. (thankfully, this glitch didn't occur again). I really dislike autosaves, I am not so incompetent that I can't manually save a game. The puzzles are incredibly simplistic, no logic involved really, and while there are a few jump-scares, there's nothing scary about this game. I did like the references to the old scifi and especially HP Lovecraft, but the use of the word faggot was completely unnecessary. There was enough abuse of the kid already without using hate speech. I don't feel that this game has any replay value, and I'm sorry I spent 5.99 on this. Also, at one point in time there was a scuba diver washed up on shore of the dam... wtf? It disappeared at my next load, so I assume it was a glitch... I just can't figure out why it was there in the first place.