Your character – a detective of some manner called Paul Prospero - has a degree of psychic ability, meaning that certain items in the world can touched, revealing events from the past. I’ll be ambiguous with some of the mechanics too. Red Creek Valley is a large, sprawling space, albeit explored in a careful order. There’s an overwhelming foreboding sense of finality, but with former beauty still there to find. House still stand, but are worn, overgrown and dishevelled. Machinery still works, but there’s no one around to use it. The autumnal colour scheme drives home these thematic tones of a fading, dying place. Everything is so meticulously crafted, and so impeccably textured, imbued with sadness and loss. A church higher up the hill is of extraordinary architecture, with a haunting and noble graveyard, and unsettling crypts. The town’s few buildings are extraordinarily beautiful and tragic, abandoned, lost to their past. A vast, curved dam offers a path from the opening woods to a small, run-down town, all above what looks like it might be industrial buildings beside the river far below. What The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter does wonderfully is create a place.
![the vanishing of ethan carter ign the vanishing of ethan carter ign](https://game.ava360.com/uploads/thumbs/06b040452-1.jpg)
Who you are, what you’re doing, who Ethan Carter is, why in the opening moments of the game you’re discovering deadly traps set in the woods, and then the mutilated remains of a man by a train track – the uncovering of the experience is the experience, so I shan’t talk about the specifics of the story at all. This is one of those situations where to explain almost anything about the first-person exploration/adventure game is to take away from your experience of playing it. I’m not sure if any game could live up to graphics this wonderful. No game since the original Far Cry has had me stop and just stare so frequently. Sumptuous forests, extraordinary vistas, old dilapidated buildings against a mesmeric sunset. It’s call-someone-in-from-another-room to-take-a-look gorgeous. There is no doubt in my mind that The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter is the most beautiful-looking game I’ve played. From the developers who brought us Bulletstorm (when they were People Can Fly), it couldn't be a more different game. Most of the game’s story is told through flashbacks as Prospero solves puzzles and puts the pieces together, and despite never actually interacting with anyone, you get a feel for the characters and the events that went down in this small Wisconsin town.The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter, the first game from The Astronauts, offers a strikingly beautiful haunting journey exploring the mystery of the disappearance of a young boy.
![the vanishing of ethan carter ign the vanishing of ethan carter ign](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Hb3UGmMhUqU/mqdefault.jpg)
What’s important though, for a game that’s based entirely on the unraveling of a story, is the voice acting. The game’s sound design really shines with the little things: creaking wood, rustling leaves, the soft thump of footsteps in an abandoned building.
![the vanishing of ethan carter ign the vanishing of ethan carter ign](https://nogameb.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Vanishing-of-Ethan-Carter-1000x333.jpg)
Ethan Carter takes a deliberately slow pace, for obvious reasons, and thus never has the chance to get clogged up and slow right down.Īs far as sound goes there’s nothing to complain about the music won’t blow your mind, but does a decent job of increasing and decreasing tension and emotion as needed. Framerate is never really an issue with this game as there aren’t multiple characters, combat, or particle effects to eat up memory and slow everything down. From the bucolic (yet still unsettling) forest to the dungeon crawler-esque mines, the game touts sharp visuals and stunning lighting. Despite the often-downgraded ports we’re used to receiving here in the console ghetto, Ethan Carter retains its absolutely stunning visuals. On the other hand, this freedom is important, because you’ll definitely want to spend some time just soaking up the atmosphere. The eeriness of the world in Ethan Carter will occasionally fall to the wayside when tunnel vision takes over during a puzzle. This freedom is lovely at first, when you’re just walking around exploring things, but if you’re used to even remotely linear gameplay, you may find it frustrating to constantly trek back and forth searching for a clue you missed. You begin the game by emerging onto some abandoned railroad tracks, and from there you can go wherever you like in whatever order you prefer. In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you play as Prospero, a detective who specializes in the paranormal who has been tasked with unraveling the mystery behind the titular character’s enigmatic departure from reality. So congratulations to The Astronauts studio, you’ve made me use my brain again-and it was a humbling experience.