The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a very pretty three-to-four hour long supernatural horror game. You play as Paul Prospero, a detective with a penchant for the supernatural who has been receiving letters for a long time from one of his fans, Ethan Carter. Gradually, however, it becomes increasingly clear to him that Ethan is in terrible danger, and so he sets off to go rescue him from the supernatural dangers around him, on what he says he is certain will be his final case.
The gameplay itself is very much that of a walking simulator, though unlike pure walking simulators, there are some (pretty simple) puzzles present in this game. The core gameplay consists of going to a new area, finding various environmental elements in the area, and then putting them together until you’ve gained enough to unlock a cutscene. Sometimes, you have to solve crimes – the deaths of various people – and to do so, you must put the elements of each scene in chronological order. Other puzzles simply unlock when you collect all the elements, while others require some other puzzle to solve them.
This is, perhaps, the game’s greatest weakness – while the game has a nice aesthetic to it, a lot of the puzzles fundamentally consist of wandering around trying to find things in the environment you can interact with. At its best, this feels like a detective wandering aroun searching for clues. At its worst, it feels like “find the hidden object”. The very first puzzle in the game, somewhat obnoxiously, occurs before you know about how these puzzle elements work, and it is very easy to overlook some of them.
The core story is decent, but kind of standard – Ethan Carter has woken up “the Sleeper”, some sort of eldritch entity which infects the minds of his family members who start trying to kill him on the Sleeper’s order. The story is presented slightly out of order – one of the very first puzzles in the game actually comes very late chronologically – but otherwise, it is mostly in order, as Ethan and his family members struggle against the Sleeper and each other as they are each possessed in turn. It is presented decently enough, and through the story we get some idea of the personality of each of Ethan’s family members, as well as his feelings towards them.
That being said, the game has a very standard twist ending which, while I saw it coming towards the end, wasn’t really something that I appreciated very much – it wasn’t terribly interesting as a twist, though the game did a decent enough job of setting up clues about it along the way. And ultimately, the core plot is all very by-the-numbers, while the side-stories, while a bit more eclectic, sometimes feel like they’re outliers just so they can be outliers.
If there is one thing this game does very well, though, it is the presentation – the Redux version of the game (which is what I played) is gorgeous, and the various side-stories look very pretty. Really, the game as a whole is very visually appealing and is a pleasure to be in, even if dark mine environment #762 is kind of… standard.
That being said, I’m left feeling ambivalent about it. I don’t know if I can recommend buying it; the experience isn’t bad, and if you already own it, it might be worth three hours of your time, but it isn’t some amazingly above-average experience. The visuals are great but the story is ultimately only okay, and I’m not sure if you’ll walk away from this thinking “Man, that was great” so much as “Well, that was decent.”
At $20, this game feels overpriced; I got it for $3.50, and I think that was about right considering. I don’t feel ripped off. But I don’t know that I can say “Go buy this.”
2.5