The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Review (PC)

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a first-person narrative-driven exploration game that, oddly enough, comes from some of the same people who created Bulletstorm, an action-packed shooter that rewarded you for pulling off juggling combos and impaling people onto cacti before making them explode.

The adventure game not only lacks rocket launchers, but offers a minimalistic approach to interaction with the game world, consisting mainly of walking from one point to the next, reading stuff, and only rarely doing anything that actually matters.

Some people who believe that games should primarily include gameplay will no doubt throw the Walking Simulator 2014 moniker around quite a bit. In the case of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, we could at least show due deference and call it Walking Simulator 2015. Let’s see why.

Story

You take on the role of Paul Prospero, a psychic detective of sorts, summoned to a rural community by the letter of a troubled boy named Ethan Carter. The letter talks about some preternatural occurrences that seem to have gotten the inhabitants of the quiet mountain town acting a tad strange, so you decide to give the poor boy a hand in uncovering what that is all about.

Ethan Carter is a weird boy, at least by the standard of his hometown. He enjoys reading and fantasizing about things that normal folks don’t think about, which translates into a social stigmata that earns him resentment from the members of his family.

His older brother mocks him, his mother wishes he were be a normal kid, his grandfather treats him nice because Ethan doesn’t yet judge him for the fact that he unwittingly killed his grandmother, and his father is the only one to take his side, being an unrealized dreamer himself.

The scenery almost makes you want to go outside

An evil presence is growing beneath the town, leaving its mark on the inhabitants of Red Creek Valley and leading the town to a grim fate. You have to uncover what happened to them and to Ethan, by making use of your supernatural detective skills.

The story is the best thing about The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and I really don’t want to spoil it, which means that I can’t really say why I liked it. In the end, it just makes sense, and makes the characters feel all the more real, seen through the eyes of a boy who tries to find an explanation for the way things are in the world.

Gameplay

The game tells you right off the bat that it won’t hold your hand, which I automatically associate with a lack in direction, because in bespoke experiences such as narrative-driven video games, you need a certain order of events to be enforced, otherwise it would be like watching a play where everyone recites random lines.

I naturally associate open-world games with a wealth of interaction, enabling me to shoot people in the face if I find their dialogues boring or to hunt deathclaws or become a cannibal, if I so feel inclined, or collect various antiques from Dwarven ruins, or anything else to that tune.

The open-world approach that developer The Astronauts decided upon is intriguing at first, as it lets your roam about without conditioning your access to the next area in any way, but given how you can’t really interact with many items, and the entire world is merely eye-candy, it quickly becomes frustrating.

I casually strolled past the first three puzzles because I was in a hurry to get to some place where I could interact with anything, which translated into a lot of backtracking later on. Having to tread the entire forest, trying to stumble upon the next thing that I was supposed to find, in order to trigger the progression event, is tedious at best.

Get a glimpse of past events

Granted, when you put it all in perspective, it doesn’t feel all that bad, but it’s like the memory of an old injury, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal now because the pain is gone. A higher density of interaction would have made the experience much more enjoyable.

That being said, let’s see how the game actually immerses you in the story. As a paranormal detective, you have the power to see into the past, to talk to ghosts and to hear things that were said a long time ago, and you have to use those powers in order to make sense of what happened to Red Creek Valley.

You observe certain objects as you walk around the countryside, and find their proper place in the events that unfolded before your arrival. When every piece is in its right place in a certain locale, you’ll trigger a vision of the past, and you’ll see the silhouettes of those who took part in a series of grisly murders, all of them having Ethan Carter as a central character.

You’ll be able to see short sequences and you have to find the right chronology in order to unlock the whole scene and have it play out in front of you, as if you were there, offering you some hints as to where to head next.

Since the order in which you do things is not set in stone, you’re able to see some things ahead of time, which leads to the story having less sense than it could have. Fortunately, by the time you reach the end, things fall into place, especially since you have to complete every scene if you want to get to the end of the game, and you’ll see what you missed the first time around.

The puzzles aren’t difficult, since that’s not the focus here, but the world still feels largely empty. It’s beautiful, and strolling through the woods, and looking at the pretty backdrop is refreshing in the beginning, but treading the same path for the tenth time trying to find something that you missed and hoping that something will get highlighted and you’ll be able to progress will put a serious dent in your enjoyment of the game.

You’ll run into a lot of invisible walls and you’ll walk aimlessly through the décor hoping to find something that you missed, thinking that some sort of progress markers would have been a really good design idea.

In addition to this, the save system can be infuriating at times, as progress is saved automatically, and since interaction is scarce and you don’t really know whether you’re doing the right thing or not, at least in the beginning, you’ll end up being pretty confused and doing the same things over and over, unless you stick around until you do get to the end of a certain scene, in order to make sure that your progress is saved.

Sound and visuals

The first thing that leaves an impression is the game’s incredible level visual fidelity. The visuals look photorealistic but also haunting in a way, austere and very still, contributing immensely to the entire experience.

Red Creek Valley’s verdant and lush environments, hit by a touch of autumn color, offer a stunning rendition of a mountain hamlet, complete with amazing vistas of waterfalls and nearby mountain ranges, shrouded in mist and foreboding.

Trekking up a path lined with conifers and fallen leaves almost makes you feel the crisp, cold mountain air, and seeing rays of light sneaking through the canopy never gets old. The incredible level of detail in the world makes the lack of interaction only stand out more, unfortunately, giving your entire adventure the overall feeling of inspecting a painting.

Play Video

The process of photogrammetry is seeing increasingly more use in modern video games, and its results, after being processed by a team of talented artists, are splendid. Instead of recycling the same shapes and tiling textures on objects, everything seems unique, tricking your brain into more easily accepting and enjoying everything, from muddy mountain paths and rocks protruding from the earth to breath-taking panoramas.

The orchestral score is also of phenomenal quality, bearing a foreboding load while at the same time never leaving the ambient music register. Everything sounds good, and the highlights of your supernatural journey are well punctuated by discreet swells and ominous aural cues.

The solid visuals and magnificent background music contribute immensely to the eerie atmosphere and unmistakable pull the game exercises on the player, in spite of its scarce interactions, and are a welcome companion on the unavoidable path to boredom that the general lack of direction will set you on.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion