Over the years, video games that have a lot of walking around and exploring an interesting or beautiful environment with minimal gameplay were given the nickname of “walking simulators”. While a few of them might the deserve the title, quite a few of them just use exploration as a way of getting to what gameplay and story there is. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter might look like another “walking simulator” from afar, but it has a lot more going for it than just it’s nice looking environment.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a horror adventure game developed and published by The Astronauts. It was originally released in 2014 for PC on the Unreal 3 Engine, and was re-released in 2015 as the Redux version, updating the game to the Unreal 4 Engine, and was released on the PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch.
You play as Paul Prospero, an occult minded detective who receives a disturbing letter from a boy named Ethan Carter. Thinking that Ethan could be in trouble, Paul goes to Ethan’s hometown of Red Creek Valley to check on him only to discover that a supernatural force in the town has take over the minds of Ethan’s family, and that Ethan may be in worse danger than he first thought.
Beyond the initial premise, the game doesn’t hold your hand, making you figure out the story on your own at your own pace by giving you access to several areas in Red Creek Valley, along with a puzzle in each area to solve that gives you story and clues as to what is going on that are solvable in any order for you to solve. Which means that if you get stuck solving a puzzle in one area, you can go to another area and solve another puzzle and come back to the puzzle you were stuck on.
None of the puzzles feel unfair, and at worse, are a little tedious. Which is most pronounced in one section where you have to go through an abandoned mine collecting several things, and what you’re collecting blends into the surroundings, making it more frustrating than it should.
Graphically, the game is gorgeous. During the games development, the development team used a process called photogrammetry in to create the look of the game, a process in which several photographs are taken of a real world object and are used to make the in-game object look like the real-world counterpart. The result is that the environment looks borderline photo-realistic (pun intended), and i really feels like you’re walking through a small almost forgotten American town.
Almost every part of the game is wallpaper worthy. I don’t think there will be or has been a user that won’t take a screenshot from the game or from online, and not put it as their wallpaper after playing this game. The only thing bringing it down are the character models. While not looking bad, they do look out of place in the game environment, but they weren’t bad enough to destroy the aesthetic of the game.
On the audio side, the game is just as pleasant to listen to as to look at. Walking through Red Creek Valley’s locations is very calming, with trees and grass rustling, wind blowing, and streams flowing. The game’s soundtrack only adds to this. Apparently the developers agree, because the Xbox One and possibly PC versions are getting a “free roam” mode in which you can just walk around Red Creek Valley.
The year after the release of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a updated version of the game called The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux came out, moving the game from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine, coming with a lot of new graphical bells and whistles that the new engine had. The content remains the same, but it comes with a better autosave feature, saving your progress after you find each clue instead of saving the game after finishing whole parts of the game, making the game much easier to jump back in to after quitting, and it also makes backtracking better late into the game, making the Redux version the version of the game to get.
There is also VR DLC, released for $10. I haven’t checked it out, but from everything I’ve seen, it seemed to get a mixed to positive response. I imagine it would be quite nice to see some of these environments up close and in detail.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is about 6 hours long, maybe a bit longer for the more experienced, but it’s definitely a highly polished game that’s beautiful visually and sound wise, has great puzzles, and a mystery that’s engaging from beginning to end. This game is highly recommended.
https://www.gog.com/game/the_vanishing_of_ethan_carter
http://store.steampowered.com/app/258520/The_Vanishing_of_Ethan_Carter/
Cult Classic Corner - Video Games 