The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (PC)

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is the first game created by Polish indie developers The Astronauts. The studio was founded in 2012 by former employees of the studio People Can Fly, which developed Painkiller and made major contributions to Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgment, among others.

So who is Ethan Carter?

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter puts the player in the role of Paul Prospero, a detective with paranormal abilities. After receiving an unsettling letter from a young boy, he heads to Red Creek Valley in order to look into the disappearance of the boy, whose name is Ethan Carter. It soon becomes apparent to that not everything in this gorgeous autumn landscape is as beautiful as it seems. Some bloody events have taken place, which your investigations as Paul Prospero will help you piece together throughout the course of the story, eventually allowing you a more complete understanding of what happened. Time and again, you’ll have to call up the ghosts of the past in order to find out what happened between Ethan and his family. In doing so, you’ll be able to choose for yourself the sequence in which the story unfolds. However, at the end, they force you to go back and complete all the tasks you missed earlier in the game. In any event, I’m not going to tell you any more about the story (which lasts about 3 hours) right here – after all, I want this test review to remain spoiler-free.

Any trigger-happy gamers hoping to find an action-packed slaughterfest in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter will most probably be shouting “boooooring” after the first few minutes of the game. There’s not a single fight scene or explosion in the whole game, and really only a few moments you could really call shocking. Even the puzzles are rather conservative and not all that hard to solve. This is also why there aren’t any help options or similar features in the game – they’re just not necessary. All you really have to do is click on a few clues, collect some objects, and then use Paul Prospero’s special gift to reconstruct events. This will vary a little from scene to scene, but somehow your approach is always going to be pretty much the same. So there’s not all that much to do here, but that was never the idea behind this game anyway, as the developers themselves admit. The focus is more on the environment, the atmosphere, and the realistic humanity of the characters.

Is that real?

In all those aspects of the game that the developers have claimed to focus on, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter gets everything right. The game’s rich and highly immersive atmosphere breathes life into it, and is captivating in a way that very few games in recent years have been able to be.

One of the reasons the game looks so amazingly realistic is the developers’ use of photogrammetry. This feature is easy to explain: the developers took lots and lots of real photographs, which they then converted into 3D models to use in the game. The result are super-impressive and incredibly detailed environments which will have you staring in awe within the first few minutes of the game. If you walk through the forest, each and every step you take is a new and fascinating view. Light shimmers through the trees in the forest, and rocks and buildings look way more realistic than you’re probably used to seeing in a video game. There are several moments in the game where you won’t be able to do anything other than stand and stare. Some scenes might have you instinctively reaching for your camera, until you remember that you can take a screenshot.

Of course, look closely enough and you will find a few little kinks in the graphics. The sky really does look realistic, but you might notice that the clouds don’t move. And every now and then, certain objects like photographs and stacks of books will appear identical in several different places. It would have also been nicer if they’d included more life in the forest by adding more animals or something – things like that would have made the whole game more life-like. Then again, this is some real nit-picking, and these issues are only noticeable because the graphics are already so amazing.

Cracking twigs and creaking floorboards

Since we’re already gushing anyway, we’d better go ahead and mention the game’s excellent sound design as well. This is especially apparent when playing with a headset. As you wander through your surroundings, there’s a wide variety of forest sounds like creaking branches, birds flying away from the scene, and howling wolves. If you’re really immersed in the game, each new sound can easily cause you to stop and just listen. Inside buildings it’s pretty much the same – every step on old wooden floorboards squeaks and creaks like in real life. Even the background melodies you can hear in a few places help to round out the total immersion experience. The voice acting is great, and otherwise the sound design is more or less perfect. Of course, there are a few minor flaws, like the fact that sounds associated with particular locations tend to cut off too soon. But all in all the game is extremely impressive in the sound department.

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