1713: Yep, You Should Play Ethan Carter

I must confess I hadn’t been paying all that much attention to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. I knew several people whose opinions I trusted were excited about it, however, so I was always intending to give it a try. And with it releasing this week and Andie out of town for the weekend, I figured tonight would be the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

I completed it, as it happens — it’s not a terribly long game, but it is a very worthwhile experience that I recommend you indulge in, preferably in a single sitting if you have three or four hours to spare.

But what is it? I hear you ask. Well, it’s… Hmm. Sort of hard to describe, in one sense, but pretty simple in another.

Its developers describe it as a non-violent investigation game in which you attempt to track down clues as to the whereabouts of the titular character, a young boy who wrote a letter to the protagonist — the rather wonderfully named Paul Prospero — prior to the eventd of the game beginning.

Now, the description of “non-violent” usually points to an example of those games that are often derided (or sometimes celebrated) as “walking simulators” — games that are, in effect, little more than theme park attractions in which you wander around and have a story delivered to you through various means. Notable recent examples include Dear Esther — which kind of invented the “genre”, if you can call it that; Gone Home, which famously got branded “Not a Game” upon the introduction of Steam’s tagging system; and The Stanley Parable, which no-one seemed to mind too much because it was amusing.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is not quite in the same wheelhouse as these games. Rather than funnelling you down a specific path, Ethan Carter offers a certain degree of freedom — though there’s still a natural order you’ll come across the game’s main… bits.

It’s these “bits” that distinguish Ethan Carter from your common-or-garden walking simulator, however, because each involves a degree of puzzle-solving, deduction and thorough investigation of the environment to succeed. And in order to see the game’s story through to its conclusion, you’ll need to succeed in all of these little mini-adventures scattered across the map.

The exact form of these mini-episodes varies with each one: some require you to simply find a bunch of objects in the nearby vicinity; some require you to figure out what happened where in a particular situation, and then correctly identify the order the events you uncovered occurred in; some are more traditional “puzzles” requiring a bit of lateral thinking and investigation to beat. The nice thing about the game’s relatively brief length is that it never feels like it’s repeating itself too much: the most-repeated game mechanic is the chronology-identifying system, and that usually comes at the conclusion of some other investigative work.

The most pleasing thing about Ethan Carter, though, is that it warns you when you start that it’s not going to hold your hand at all, and then it’s true to its word. No navigation arrows. No journal. No flashing objectives. Just you and your brain looking out onto the lovingly detailed (albeit fairly small) open world that forms the setting for Prospero’s investigations.

And what a world. It may be small, but it’s beautifully crafted; this is by far one of the best-looking games I’ve seen for a long time. Outdoors, grass, bushes and trees blow in the wind as the sunlight streaks down through gaps in the leaves. Indoors, light streaming in through windows shows dust floating in the breeze. Textures are beautifully detailed, meaning you can easily read things like book titles and small incidental signs without having to get right up close to them, and the overall atmospheric effects are marvellously convincing: there’s a lovely gentle haze in the background, and although the explorable area of the map is fairly small, the background is rendered in a convincing enough manner to suggest that the area you’re tooling around in is very much part of a much larger world. It’s gorgeous — and it provided the workout I’ve been craving for my brand new nVidia GTX 970 graphics card, which handled it perfectly on max settings without breaking a sweat. Lovely.

I shan’t get into the story of Ethan Carter now, since with it being so short, it’s something you really should experience yourself. I will say, however, that I enjoyed it a great deal, and can recommend it highly — even if you’re not normally a fan of non-violent “walking simulators”. The puzzle-solving and investigative elements elevate this far above titles like Dear Esther and Gone Home in gameplay terms, and, although short, it’s a satisfying game to work through and complete.

So go on. Set aside a few hours this weekend and go find out just where Ethan Carter has got to. You won’t regret it.