As someone who loves a good, chilling mystery, the premise for The Astronauts’ first-person adventure game, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter seemed right up my alley. A detective with supernatural powers and the ability to re-live the victims’ final moments in an attempt to piece together the crime? A missing boy and a seemingly abandoned little settlement with something potentially sinister lurking in the shadows? All things that excite me. Add to that the utterly gorgeous graphical presentation and the game could have been something truly special – the emphasis here is on “could have been”, as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter – unfortunately – didn’t quite deliver what I was hoping it would. Allow me to elaborate.
A solitary journey
I suppose it might be appropriate to start the review by addressing the way the game itself launches – with a message stating that it’s not going to hold your hand. It may not be evidently clear at first what this refers to, but allow me to explain. What it *doesn’t* refer to is a series of challenging puzzles, because you won’t find them here – instead, the game sort of throws you into its open world without communicating how its fundamental mechanics actually function. During most of the adventure, you will wander a relatively open – though still ultimately linear – wilderness, trying to, well… solve the mystery. And you’re not even exactly sure *what* you’re supposed to be doing to achieve this. Now, there’s nothing wrong with refusing to give the player tutorial upon tutorial and instead encouraging him or her to overcome a mental challenge using their own wits. The thing is – there are no challenges to overcome here. Instead, this felt more like an attempt at covering up for the fact that Ethan Carter’s puzzles are incredibly shallow and unimaginative, with the game purposefully withholding information regarding its core mechanics to seemingly lengthen its play time as you stumble across the wilderness. In practice, the vast majority of the puzzles in the game (with maybe one exception that I found fairly interesting) boil down to exploring every nook and cranny of an area to find all the objects you can interact with. Things don’t escalate any further most of the time: you don’t need to think hard about which items to use where (the game explicitly tells you), nor do you need to combine various items like one would expect in most other adventure titles. Similarly, the oft-mentioned “supernatural” aspect of the gameplay is just as shallow, with no particular thought or effort required from the player to successfully rearrange a murder chronology – in fact, pure trial and error will get you through all of them. The bottom line is that those expecting cleverly thought-out puzzles and obstacles from the game will be left disappointed. Ultimately, Ethan Carter is still mostly a title that focuses on walking and sightseeing – which, by the way, is quite enjoyable in its own right due the game’s stunning visuals –, with an extremely shallow layer of pseudo-interactivity tacked onto the final product.
Hiking through an idyllic landscape
The game does set itself up to be something truly haunting and eerie, and is backed by fantastic visuals, an excellent atmosphere and a poignant soundtrack – this I won’t deny. Those looking for actual horror, however, will generally not find it here – the majority of the adventure feels more like an idyllic trip to the countryside rather than a genuinely haunting experience. Ironically, the only location in the game where this tendency is somewhat reversed ends up relying on cheap, B movie scares and thus dismantles any potential atmosphere it may have built up till that point, which is disappointing, to say the least.
The Vanishing of Ethan CarterPlatform: PC, PS4Genre: AdventureDeveloper: The AstronautsRelease: 09/25/2014Rated: 16+PEGISadly, the game also falls short in terms of telling a genuinely engaging, memorable tale, which I find to be a critical flaw when it comes to crafting a primarily narrative experience. Delivery of the game’s narrative is achieved through finding newspaper clippings and watching a number of very brief “flashbacks” play out before you. What roughly happened to the inhabitants of the scenic valley becomes evident relatively early on, and after that, I was more or less just hoping for some kind of a surprise revelation that would spice up the otherwise extremely straightforward plot. And there is actually one at the very end of the game, when all is revealed. However, the game ends up explaining its fairly straightforward and cliché narrative with an even more cliché twist, one that inevitably left me tremendously dissatisfied and nearly invalidated all I had uncovered up to that point. Similarly, the characters involved with the tale are hardly given enough development – either through direct or indirect storytelling –, and by the end, you barely feel like you even know anything about them, further lessening the impact of a finale that in another, better-handled game, could have been both thought-provoking and emotional. There’s just not a lot of meat to chew on with Ethan Carter, I feel, and if we look at similar narrative experiences from the past (Gone Home, by comparison, did an excellent job in fleshing out its characters through various morsels of information left in the environment), The Astronaut’s mystery leaves a lot to be desired.
A mere ghost of a game
Trying to rate the Vanishing of Ethan Carter puts me in a very difficult position. I wish I could recommend it – I really do –, but at the end of the day, I can’t with good conscience do it. I’m not against this type of game at all: in fact, I found plenty of enjoyment in 2013’s Gone Home, a game that I felt had flaws, but one I still remember fondly. The visual presentation and general atmosphere of Ethan Carter is indeed superb and prepares you for something breathtaking – unfortunately, it never quite takes your breath away, instead leaving you utterly underwhelmed. I’m certain the game will remain embedded in the collective memory of the game industry primarily due to its visuals – will I remember the story it told a year or two from now on, though? Of that, I’m not so certain.
