A detective receives a letter from Ethan Carter, a young boy who has recently gone missing. He must enter a small town and discover what happened to the boy. A few murders and mysteries will come up along the way, any of which may be the key to uncovering the entire mystery.
1. Gameplay
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a slow, short game but one that deserves your attention. I am a huge fan of murder mysteries, especially when they come in video game format. Ethan Carter gives me a small taste of exactly what I want in a larger murder mystery, but in a way that seems more like a concept demo than an actual game. This isn’t a terrible thing, I just felt like the game lacked enough content to make it feel like a full game. The visuals make up for this for the most part (the game is absolutely gorgeous), but I think I would have enjoyed a Murdered: Soul Suspect-sized game with the creativity, mechanics, and visuals of Ethan Carter.
There are less than ten mysteries total, but each one is unique enough that it is memorable. This is especially true for the side puzzles, each of which surprised me and made me feel great once I figured out exactly what I was supposed to do. They were complicated, but from the start you could tell there was a definite pattern to it all. And that’s how the entire game is purposefully designed. The developers state from the very beginning that the game will not hold your hand. You have to figure out everything. The story, the mechanics, even the basic controls will not be immediately apparent.
You have to appreciate the slower, less action-packed elements of the game in order to have fun with it, though. The visuals are a huge part of the appeal. Being able to wander around the forest and appreciate the beauty of what the artists managed to create will make the entire experience much more enjoyable. A good 75% of the overall gameplay will just be wandering around, so if you get bored within the first few minutes things aren’t really going to pick up.
Overall I’d say pick this one up at a discount. It’s a fascinating look at what can be done by a few good artists with a little bit of free time, but it isn’t going to last you more than a few hours. I appreciated it and enjoyed the mystery, but the lack of content made the entire game not really live up to my expectations.
This game is very short and has little replay value. It’s worth going through once, but I managed to solve all of the cases in about 3 hours. There are no story options and no other elements that might increase the length or replay value of this game. I believe this is definitely worth playing, but it’s a very short experience.
Making puzzle games like this is a very delicate process. The developers have to give the player enough information to complete the puzzle but still make it take time to figure out. There were a few times when lack of clear information left me wondering where to go next. This was not much of an issue when solving the cases (although the first murder case definitely had this issue), but mostly became a factor when I had to find a small tunnel to get through or cross a wide river without making use of a bridge or other clear path.
All of these issues stemmed from the design of the environment. While the dense foliage looks beautiful, it can disguise key elements that would otherwise be relatively easy to find. A hidden tunnel near a gate, for example, might be simple to find when grass and trees are sparse but the hunt becomes much more tedious when it’s camouflaged by overgrowth. A bloody rock might be obvious when placed on a gravel path, but is much better hidden by the shadows of grass and a tree stump.
But these are minor issues that could have been solved with a bit more testing from fresh eyes and they didn’t seriously impact my appreciation for the environment and the story as a whole.
2. Parental Notices
Violence is a factor with the murder scenes but is overall not a prominent element. The violence within the murder scenes will vary depending on what happened, but the murder scenes are the only sources of violence in the game.
The first murder scene is by far the most gruesome. It depicts a man who had his legs cut off by a train. The man then crawled farther down a hill where he was beaten to death with a crankshaft. This was by far the bloodiest and goriest crime.
The others weren’t nearly as bad. One involved a person being stabbed in the back, another involved a person being drowned, the last a person being stabbed with scissors. Blood was definitely prominent in these, especially in the last, but it didn’t seem as bad as the first crime.
The violence in these crimes is counterbalanced by how little the violence is a factor in the overall game. The images depicted above are just a small part of the game. Much more time is spent solving the crimes or walking around the environment.
Sexuality is not a direct factor in this game, although I would advise that you read the “Miscellaneous” section below, since the language in this game was very homophobic.
One of the mystery involves the player finding a magician’s secret alchemy room. The room was actually a distillery hidden in an attic.
Gambling is not a factor in this game.
3. Other Factors
There are no modding tools available for this game.
There is a church and a religious graveyard in the game with some Christian symbols and statues, but this doesn’t really factor into the story. It’s a location for another one of the murder mysteries and little else.
The family all seem to be under the influence of “the sleeper” and its mysterious powers, but their cult-like fanaticism for this sleeper seems less to do with any religious beliefs than some sort of mind control.
Anti-law is not a factor in this game.
There are no multiplayer components to this game.
Extreme sports are not a factor in this game.
Much of the mystery cases in the main story and almost all of the side stories all involve magic of some sort. Some are more prominent than others, but it’s definitely a factor throughout the game. In the main stories, the player uses some sort of time vision to see what happened at a particular murder scene.
The side stories are much less subtle about their use of magic. For example, the astronaut that leads the player on a chase through the forest.
Or the magic gate that holds a giant squid / Cthulhu creature behind it that can only be opened by the correct magical combination.
Or the magician who sealed his house off with portals and requires the player to go through the correct portals in order to progress.
The player will never really directly cast magic (although arguments about whether or not the player is casting the time magic in order to see what happened with the different murder cases can definitely be made), but it would be correct to say that magic is featured repeatedly in this game.
Language This is one of those rare instances when the use of language only happens on very rare occasions in the game but these times are so significant, such a contrast to the rest of the game, and so wildly out of place that I can’t help but mention it. At the end of the game the player, through the eyes of Ethan, gets called a “faggot” repeatedly by a number of his family members. The game made it clear that Ethan was bullied because of his stories and daydreaming, but the use of homophobic slurs like this one has to be carefully and deliberately set up and I don’t think that was done here.
It only comes up at the very end of the game, but it was a surprise to me in a bad way.
Suicide
One of the victims the player can find committed suicide rather deal with one of the other family members. The victim was, figuratively and literally, backed into a wall and saw no other way out.
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