Publisher: Astronauts
Developer: Astronauts
Year: 2014
Platform: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Switch

Rating: 6

Upon starting The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you are told that this horror-lite narrative adventure will not be holding your hand. And boy it ain’t kidding. While I can squint and see a reason why the designers made this choice, it honestly put me off the game for years. But after looking up a brief tutorial on-line, everything clicked and I breezed through the game in one day and I quite enjoyed the experience.

Narration opens the game as you, paranormal investigator Paul Prospero, walk out of a tunnel into the fictional mining town of Red Creek Valley, Wisconsin. Paul says he’s there to help out a young boy named Ethan Carter who had been writing to him for a while and has asked for his help. And that’s as much as you’re told before you’re set free to fumble around.

Red Creek Valley is realized in full 3D from a first-person point of view. The game is open world as you explore the woods, a broken rail, dilapidated homes, a graveyard, a mine, and a hydroelectric station. While the graphics won’t blow your mind (which, per the designers, was intentional), the town is immersive and genuinely feels like a real place (indeed, it is based off a real Polish area in the Karkonosze Mountains). The soundtrack by Mikolai Stroinski is fantastic, each section of the game having its own mysterious, haunting, monster of the week track. Individual moments are not punctuated with scares; you’re allowed to just be in the mood of the music.

Reviewing the rest of the game without spoilers is impossible, so if you plan to play blind as the designers intended you should hit the road (with Paul Prospero).

There are ten sections to explore and solve. While you can do them in any order you like, the plot is a bit more cohesive if you’re able to go in order. The first entails locating five traps in the woods meant to prevent you from discovering the town’s “secrets.” Once you do so, one of Ethan’s short stories magically appears, which somewhat mirrors the experience you just had. It’s clear from the beginning that Ethan is a bit of an outcast in his family, and his fantasy writings are misunderstood and condemned by most of them. In other sections things get a bit more intense as you discover and solve murders (by locating evidence and then recreating the order of events) while learning more about Ethan’s life in Red Creek Valley.

Most of the game is simply walking around and finding clues. Once you’ve found them, you often need to “fix” the scene by putting things back where they belong. The game will help by guiding you in the general direction of where things should be. Examples include moving a train car back to the scene of the crime, or placing a weapon back where it belongs. Once you understand the game’s logic, most of the puzzles are rather simple. Yet the process of doing the investigative work can be quite rewarding. The result is often a visual or audio recreation of what occurred, with voice narration by the people in Ethan’s life. While the dialogue is minimal, it’s fairly effective at investing you in Ethan’s fate.

There are a few other adventure game type puzzles that require a bit more legwork. A couple of times I looked up a walkthrough, not because the puzzles were terribly difficult (indeed I knew how to solve them), but because I didn’t care to put in the time and wanted to plow through the story. I probably put five hours into the game, which was the perfect amount of time.

For those who loved What Remains of Edith Finch, which came out a few later, you will likely enjoy yourself here as well. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a lot more puzzle heavy and doesn’t quite reach the same visual wonderment, but the story is similarly strong and they just damn well nailed the ending. It can be interpreted in many ways, and I love every single one of them.