The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Reviews
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter's too much focus on story telling might prevent it from offering a true adventure experience, but nevertheless the story, atmosphere and world design is so solid that you'll just love it.
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Personally I can’t recommend this game enough. If you have an evening available and you are looking for a great game then you should give The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter a try!
I've tried to temper my enthusiasm for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, but it's difficult to remain objective when writing about something you've genuinely enjoyed. If you hate puzzles, you won't like this game. If you only want fast-paced, explosive action then you won't like this game. If you want nothing but to be scared senseless, then you probably won't like this game. If any of the above apply then you really should look elsewhere, but if you want a well-crafted (and at times totally insane) adventure through a twisted, but beautiful world that's driven by a compelling plot then The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is very much your kind of game. It's on steam now, at only £14.99.
"Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction," writes Lovecraft, and in the end it is the game's loyalty to this principle which often makes The Vanishing of Ethan Carter such engrossing experience. And while a bit atmosphere never killed anyone, the subtle macabre of Ethan Carter's world will certainly mess with your head if you let it.
But that's another debate for another day. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is one of the most beautiful games ever developed, and backs its aesthetics up with some of the finest Lovecraftian narratives that we've seen in interactive form. It's a compelling argument for games as art, in other words, and not just because it makes for some awesome digital postcards.
I'd never have pegged the folks behind Bulletstorm to craft something like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, but I'm very glad that they did. It has a few niggling issues, but ultimately this is a brilliantly subtle, imaginative and thoughtful game.
With its near photorealistic visuals and great voice acting, it's a unique game that I wholeheartedly urge any Playstation 4 owner to experience once
The Astronauts made an interesting experiment with The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and while the team's attempt to tell some kind of tragic and emotional story is kind of effective, the overall gameplay, which serves as the grubby middleman that glues the whole tapestry together, is just not the hours wandering around in the Wisconsin woods. This probably would have made for a great novel instead of a video game.
In the end, Ethan Carter's ratios are just a bit off: maybe a little less hand-holding at certain times, a little more at others. But to pretend that it's not there at all is just a refusal to acknowledge the way in which details and design choices can limit or direct play.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a splendid narrative experience that is not to be missed. If this one is sitting in your Steam library, your wishlist, or your mental wishlist, just pull the trigger and find out what happened to Ethan Carter. It's a story unlike any other.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is perhaps the best walking simulator I have ever played, dabbling in the occult without being a cheesy ghost story where weird stuff just happens for no reason other than the call of Cthulhu.
Despite it all though, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a deeply atmospheric visual treat, that seems as much about just being there as experiencing the tale set within it. What The Astronauts has created here is a believable and immersive world unfortunately backed up by a poor tale and barebones gameplay. I'd be hard-pressed to say it's not worth a go whatsoever, but for a glorified walk in the woods you may be better off waiting until it's on sale.
It's all too rare that we get games like this, where the mysteries are genuinely intriguing and can be played at one's own pace. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is weird and macabre in delicious and often surprising ways. Its tales of madness intensify an already-oppressive atmosphere of decay, telling a compelling story of a town gone mad and a kid trying to make sense of it all. It's just that those stories are so well-hidden behind invisible game mechanics that players themselves may go mad in the process.
An average story mixed with some great nuggets to experience, all of which takes place in beautiful backdrops and wonderful accompanying music.
A must purchase experience that invokes a feeling of true beauty, reflection and freedom. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter needs to be experienced to truly understand as both a game and self-reflective journey of beauty and warmth
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is all about the journey, and the journey here is spectacular both visually and narratively. This game is something special.
As superb as the experience of simply exploring [The Vanishing of Ethan Carter's] eerie environments is, unravelling the plot's mystery isn't terribly enjoyable.
Despite a few issues that prevent the game from being a wholly immersive open-world exploratory experience, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter packs an impressive punch. The four to five hour long game's world is aesthetically perfect, the stories are equal parts fascinating and bizarre and it's a hell of a ride from beginning to end.
The Vanishing Ethan Carter is definitely the must play game of the year that successfully creates a gripping and engaging tale without an ounce of input from the game itself. All the clues are right in front of the player and thus it's up to you to put back together this amazing jigsaw puzzle about a young boy and his dark family with some of the best graphics you'll witness on the PC. More importantly, the game definitely deserves another play through due to the cleverly written puzzles and wondrous links to the Carter family.
Ethan Carter is a powerful, entrancing game that'll live with you long after the credits have rolled. Just don't let anyone spoil it for you.