The Vanishing of Ethan Carter remained a dark horse until its release. Quite a rare situation these days, because nowadays the norm is to show half of the game in endless developer’s diaries, trailers, and pieces of recorded walkthroughs. The Astronauts only did one demo, outlining what awaits us. It’s not easy to just assume what a mystery detective by former People Can Fly employees, who created Painkiller and Bulletstorm, will be. In the end, we faced almost the incarnation of some previously unpublished Howard Lovecraft story in the format of interactive entertainment.
Paul Prospero, a private investigator with unusual powers, slowly walks through a tunnel and sets foot on the lands of Red Creek Valley. Despite the mesmerizing beauty of the scenery, the protagonist has not arrived to admire nature, but to search for the very Ethan Carter. The boy himself asked the private investigator for help, but was lost somewhere in these parts. In fact, all the neighborhood residents in the form of a couple Carter’s disappeared somewhere, leaving behind a few empty mansions. However, the first member of the family can be found rather quickly. Or rather – his legs, quite carelessly separated from the body by the train carriage. Details of this heinous atrocity, we have yet to find out, using a special gift of our alter ego.
It would be tantamount to a crime to tell us what happened next, because The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a riveting tale that makes you want to read every letter of it yourself. It has a very Lovecraftian atmosphere to it: unhurried, drawn-out, focusing on details where you don’t have to (note the occasional clock), and confusing until the finale. The Astronauts has very little action and a lot of contemplation in the manner of Dear Esther. Most of the time you have to leisurely stroll through the valley, flooded with the rays of the setting sun. The developers warn from the start that no one will lead the player by the hand. There is no inventory, no map and not even a notebook with notes. You will have to go wherever you can see, and at first you are at a loss for such an approach. The world seems quite vast, and you want to explore every bit of it.
However, pretty soon it becomes clear that the valley is not so huge, and the passage turns out to be a leisurely stroll along the path, which has several branches with dead ends and a couple of alternative routes. The Astronauts manages to maintain the illusion of freedom in an elegant way: if you see a place of interest in the distance, you’re almost certain to eventually reach it. It gives you a nice sense of movement toward the goal you set out earlier. You can always return to the beginning of your journey to look for anecdotal stories, or glimpses into the lives of the valley’s inhabitants. Each of these is a unique puzzle. They all need to be solved to see the end of the story, so we recommend that you look carefully along the way.
Other characters we will be able to see only in flashbacks
To find out the mystery of Ethan’s disappearance and the mysterious force that has settled in the valley, Paul will have to resort to the help of his gift: by touching the object, the detective can see the events that happened to him in the past. If we draw parallels, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter reminds the recent Murdered: Soul Suspect with its main gameplay part. The detective examines the crime scene and finds all the key things. If something is missing, the evidence must be found and returned to its original position. When all the details fall into place, the next step is to play the picture in the right order. Only the correct sequence will tell us what really happened and give us a clue to our next step. These puzzles are usually solved without much trouble, you just need to think logically, and they occur less than a dozen times in the entire four hours of play.
As you have probably already realized, the project is not focused on gameplay, but on contemplation and storytelling. Being aware of that, the developers put all their talent and care into the visuals, and so The Vanishing Ethan Carter turned out to be really charming. It is hard to believe the old Unreal Engine 3 can create such pictures. The panoramic views can be shamelessly called photorealistic.
