If you haven’t heard of Poland based game developers “The Astronauts” yet, it’s quite possible you know the studio’s founders from their past projects under the moniker “People Can Fly”. If it’s still not ringing a bell these are the people that brought you adrenaline fueled shooters like Painkiller and Bulletstorm. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is The Astronauts first title and its slow burning puzzle gameplay is a pretty significant departure from the stylistic shooting and dick talk in Bulletstorm.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is visually stunning from literally its first scene.
The game doesn’t waste any time putting its cards on the table. Immediately upon starting up the player is warned: “This game is a narrative experience that will not hold your hand,” and they’re not joking. Players have pretty much completely free range of the game’s map right from the start. There’s no compass or mission objectives and though puzzles are laid out in a somewhat sequential order, it’s very likely that you will miss that order when solving them.
The game’s story is told through the eyes of renowned paranormal investigator Paul Prospero. Paul has been lured to the sleepy town known as Red Creek Valley by some intriguing letters from a young boy named Ethan Carter. Ethan claims to have stumbled upon some sort of ancient evil in the sleepy valley that has slowly been corrupting the minds of his immediate family. In short Ethan knows something bad is likely to happen to him soon, and he believes that Paul may be his last hope.
By the time you arrive in Red Creek Valley it’s clear that things have taken a turn for the worst. You won’t venture far into town before coming across your first corpse. While the game features a number of different puzzles to solve, murder investigations are definitely the stand out events that you’ll encounter. Your first task is to return the crime scene to the state it was in before the murder occurred. This usually involves finding the corpse and returning the murder weapon to its original location. Once the stage is set you’ll be shown several scenes that outline how the killing occurred and be asked to tag them chronologically. Once you have the entire scenario in the proper order you’ll be able to witness the complete scene and generally get a clue to help you figure out where to head next.
The game’s atmosphere is delightfully unsettling. Murder scenes are sufficiently grisly, the woods you’ll be spending most of your time in are quiet and simple but the game’s excellent soundtrack still manages to make them feel menacing even as birds sing in the background. Although I hesitate to call the game horror, it does certainly feature horrific elements. Still it’s generally very reserved, you’re not going to encounter a jump scare every few steps, that’s not to say that the world is completely safe either though.
A lot of the fun in The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter just comes from unraveling the mysteries within the plot. As a result I want to try my absolute best to keep spoilers to a bare minimum. The game’s runtime will vary depending on how much exploring you do. I finished everything in about 4 hours but I saw plenty of people on Steam who had 6 or 7 under their belt before completion.
Puzzles are contained to a fairly limited geographical area. Because you’re able to go anywhere right off the bat I found myself walking right past the first two major puzzles, assuming that I needed to find something else in the world to help me when really I just needed to inspect the earlier zones more carefully. If you encounter what feels like a new puzzle it’s a safe bet you’ve gone too far and will need to backtrack to solve the prior one.
Oh did I mention that the game looks incredible? The team has worked some real magic with the Unreal 4 engine. Although it did cause my aging GTX 560 some stutters and stops for the most part the game ran pretty great, and I often couldn’t believe that it was running on close to max settings on my three year old PC.
“Dammit Midge, help me find my ghost contacts!”
The game is not without its flaws. For the most part there are no failure states, but there is at least one puzzle segment that will force you to restart it if you fail and I found it to be a rather frustrating and out of place element in the game. Even the murders, which start out as a real highlight, get progressively simpler as the game moves towards its conclusion. By the time you get to the last one there’s really no challenge left in figuring out its chronology.
Still The Vanishing of Ethan Carter left me with more positive impressions than negative ones. It’s a brief, menacing experience that will keep you ruminating on its mysteries long after the end credits roll. If you wished that Gone Home had some more teeth to it then this is the game you’ve been waiting for.
