The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
An abundant imagination is both a virtue and a curse. While fantasy can offer a place to hide when reality turns hostile, our minds remain the one prison from which none of us can truly escape. A cautionary tale of imagination run amok, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is the story of a withdrawn boy for whom make-believe provides a refuge from the reproaches of his dysfunctional family. Ethan’s obsession with tall tales however only causes further turbulence in his family life and eventually leads to his mysterious disappearance.
In undertaking the search for Ethan’s whereabouts, players will confront not only the ominous fate of his home town, Red Creek Valley, but also the darkness of their own psyche. A place where “large pieces of this country were thrown away, doomed to become, and then remain, the worst versions of themselves”, Red Creek Valley’s desolate rural landscapes cultivate an atmosphere of uneasiness and apprehension that grows in its intensity the longer the player is exposed to its loneliness. Indeed, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a stark reminder that when left to wallow in our fears and insecurities, it's easy to become our own worst nightmares.
Before the player arrives in Red Creek Valley, Ethan’s story is already over. Much like in Dear Esther or Bioshock, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’s narrative is not so much received as it is discovered, pieced together from evidence found in the environment such as objects that can be picked up and manipulated or simply clues in the scenery. Taking this “forensic storytelling” format to its literal conclusion, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter casts the player as a private detective – Paul Prospero’s the name – who must investigate a number of murders connected to Ethan’s disappearance. They’ll do so by scouting each of the murder scenes for clues, using Prospero’s psychic abilities to track down evidence. Another paranormal twist has the player examining ghostly apparitions of the culprits and their victims, their transparent images posed in a collection of freeze frames which, once arranged in the correct order, reveal a full motion replay of what really transpired. Though presented as the game’s key set pieces, these sections make up only a small portion of how the player will spend their time, the remainder of which unfolds without so much as a soul in sight.
Even the game’s developers are keen to leave you alone. During its opening cinematic, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter rather haughtily declares itself “a narrative experience the does not hold you hand”. While this assertion isn’t strictly true, it is perhaps a tacit recognition that the game is most engaging when it lets the player be. Players are permitted to explore the game’s world as extensively as they desire and given the artistry of its construction they’ll likely want to in spades. At times, Red Creek Valley demonstrates what are surely the most convincing representations of realistic geography yet achieved by the medium. They’ll also find their curiosity rewarded by subtle instances of environmental expression that are the game’s crowning achievement; the churning anxiety of tiptoeing around a derelict church yard; the awe of a lambent sunset viewed from atop an abandoned dam.
The soundtrack helps squeeze the most out of these moments, providing an accompaniment of suitably tenebrous music that occasionally drops out entirely to further ratchet up the tension. Building upon a handful of harmless but nonetheless startling jump scares at the game’s outset, these flourishes contribute to general a sense of eeriness with which the game renders every footstep a potentially treacherous one, letting players work themselves into a state of perpetual apprehension while actually showing them very little to be frightened of.
It’s disappointing then that developer The Astronauts often break their own rules with regards to mediating the player’s experience. The hands-off approach so expertly deployed in the game’s world design doesn't extend to its investigation scenarios, which feel belittling and contrived. Relevant evidence is clearly labelled by a floating “Inspect” sign, a facile solution to a problem that plagues all hidden object games which attempt to simulate reality. As game designer and critic Ian Bogost explains, the requisite “surfeit of extraneousness” that makes a virtual space believable by definition risks preventing the things you’re meant to find from standing out. What's more, these sequences also violate the spirit of weird fiction, the literary sub-genre which The Astronauts cite as being a fundamental influence on The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. H.P. Lovecraft stressed that the supernatural should be treated “very impressively and deliberately — with a careful emotional “build-up” — else it will seem flat and unconvincing”.
On the contrary, Paul Prospero’s paranormal powers are presented with little fanfare and serve no obvious function in Ethan’s story, coming across as a mechanical convenience with little expressive quality. It’s a real shame, because elsewhere The Astronauts demonstrate a comfortable deftness in their capacity to blend the weirdness of Ethan’s stories with the game’s photo-realistic style, and the results are often thoroughly unsettling. “Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction,” writes Lovecraft, and in the end it is the game’s loyalty to this principle which often makes The Vanishing of Ethan Carter such engrossing experience. And while a bit atmosphere never killed anyone, the subtle macabre of Ethan Carter’s world will certainly mess with your head if you let it.