The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (TVoEC) was praised last year by our very own Eric Layman and his annual top games list. He was kind enough to give me the nod to take on this re-release on the PS4. I have not played this game before, but having recently played through KHOLAT, I was up for another first person horror/mystery (I have yet to play others in the genre like Gone Home, Dear Esther, etc).
The premise is straight-forward, you play a detective with a paranormal slant named Paul Prospero and you’ve been asked to come to the sleepy town of Red Creek Valley to find a young boy named Ethan Carter. It’s a very pretty, but undeniably austere town that on the one hand welcomes you with its beautiful mountain forests and streams, yet on the other tells you something is very wrong, as evident by dead bodies and other unsettling arrangements you’ll find scattered about.
Similar to KHOLAT, TVoEC is a first person exploration game with puzzle elements that are required to discover and “account for” in order to unravel the full mystery. Much of this content can be missed entirely if you do not explore thoroughly enough. Control interactions are accordingly basic, allowing movement, unlimited running, the ability to zoom, crouch, and interact. When you stumble upon something of interest, stylized (as if written by Paul) short-form notes will pop-up that give insight into what your detective character is thinking. He’ll speak, too, often providing a grim if vague observation of something generally related to what’s going on. Anyway, as you discover these clues, you’ll see a very brief, seamlessly integrated bit of the whole picture. Once you have found all clues for a specific ‘scene,’ you are tasked with arranging them in chronological order. Doing this puts the full scene on display and gets you closer to solving the case.
It’s up to the visuals and the compelling mystery to drive the game forward, as mechanically, there is really nothing else to it. I’ll admit that while I am getting into the first person exploration genre slowly, I appreciated that KHOLAT at least had a map that updated as you progressed and it made it easier to stay on track. With Ethan Carter, you get no aids at all, and my compulsion to check every edge of the game world often led to a lot of wasted trips and back-tracking. I can stand this if I’m enjoying the rest of the game enough, but with TVoEC, I realized that after my first break (somewhere about an hour in), I could probably get as much or more enjoyment out of watching someone else play this than I could from playing and stumbling through it myself, as I just did not find myself intrigued enough. You could say the same for any game in the genre as the interactivity and variety between someone’s play through and another’s are not going to be starkly different. The silver-lining has to be in what else it offers the player, and in this case, the pretty graphics and dark mystery weren’t compelling enough for me to keep me hooked.
I’ll see TvoEC through to its completion, in one form or another, but there is no compelling reason I can see for coming back (unless there is a VR patch). This is, fairly I would say, considered one of the very best games in the genre, but it’s a genre that is still early on, and has its inherent limitations. As for the PS4 re-release, from what I did see of the original release on PC, it was already a great looking game and, not being a videophile or graphics snob in the first place, I cannot honestly say the PS4 version was the greatest thing I have seen or blew me away. Photorealism is cool and all, but I can get that looking out the window. When it comes to games, I’d rather have more un-natural art style, if that makes sense. As for the apparently numerous fixes also included in this release, having not played the original, these are also lost on me too, but for what it’s worth I have yet to experience any technical problems.
To the summary…