The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Reviews
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.
Do you have a PC? Is it reasonably up-to-date? Well, if you haven't played The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you're missing out on one of the best games of the year. Developer The Astronauts has crafted a masterful mystery in an unbelievably beautiful and atmospheric setting, and raised the bar for what this kind of an experience can be. And, for an extremely reasonable price of admission, you, too, can find yourself never wanting to leave its well-crafted world.
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.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a fantastic game. My only true complaints are the short length and lack of replayability, but I can easily stomach that after enjoying it so much. I'd love to see more games in this vein from The Astronauts since the story really grabs the players and pushes them to continue. It is definitely worth playing for those that enjoy a bit of suspense in the middle of supernatural mystery.
'The Vanishing of Ethan Carter' is not a perfect game. It's an alarmingly creative step in the ongoing trek of telling stories through games. At times, I got lost, and some of the puzzles seem like the output of a developer running out of steam, but the core mechanics at play are always gravitating towards Ethan's trials as a kid struggling with family. Exploring these overgrown environments is a way to step into Ethan's lonesome shoes, solving the crimes show his fears and uncovering his stories meaning passing through the doomed optimism of a young, fertile mind. There's tragedy in the small and big moments alike. The framework for this story has been told before, but never like this, never in a way that only games can tell it. Supernatural indeed.
Perhaps where The Vanishing of Ethan Carter succeeds most is in establishing a sense of place. This is the kind of game that you'll want to get lost in. Grab a pair of headphones, listen to the wind rustle through trees, and do your best to get through its four-hour journey in a single sitting. Even something as simple as walking out of the forest into a sunlit glade has impact, and as you follow the twists and turns of its multi-threaded story, you'll be caught up in its unsettling intrigue.
The core elements of the game are all very good: story, visuals and gameplay are top notch, but they don't combine particularly well. The lofty ideas of player independence are held back by the need to tell a convincing story and the narrative can conversely be held back by the degree of player agency that does exist. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an enjoyable short game by all accounts, the sum just isn't quite as good as the parts.
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.
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.
If you have the three or four hours to devote to it and care about the future of games as a storytelling medium, Ethan Carter is must-play.
In the end, 'The Vanishing of Ethan Carter' is a great game to pick up.
A beautiful, if somewhat frustrating, adventure game.
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.
"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.
That's the irony of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter in a nutshell. When you first start up the game, it declares that it "is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand," but that's true only of its mechanics. Narratively it holds your hand so tightly that once it was over I had to wait a few minutes for feeling to return.
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.
This beautiful detective story refuses to lead you by the hand – instead providing a rich and mysterious world to explore and experience
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is one of this year's most engaging and beautifully crafted narratives that should not be missed by any fan of immersive storytelling.
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.
I believe The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an incredible game that shouldn't be missed. Of course it won't be everyone's cup of tea and it's massively story-centered, but if you don't mind this, you will enjoy what is a real jewel of a game and a title from which the gaming industry can learn a lot.