Steam

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Christ have I been playing a lot of so-called “walking simulators” lately. I honestly didn’t expect The Vanishing of Ethan Carter to turn out like one but that’s the pseudo genre it ended up fitting best. I was looking forward to Vanishing, it’s initial trailer over a year ago showing off a cool looking image of a of traveling through portals and solving murder mysteries by piecing them together from clues before going back to watch them in real time. At least, that’s what I had gathered from the trailer. In fairness, that element seemed to have been present throughout, but it makes up far less of the game than I had originally imagined.

No, most of your time in Vanishing is spent walking. I actually don’t have a problem with the somewhat derogatory term “walking simulator” because for a lot of these games that’s all they end up being. Regardless of how effective it is, these games mostly involve you being talked at by a disembodied narrator while you passively trot around a set location. This is the equivalent of dropping a 5-minute cutscene of exposition before normal gameplay would resume, except that walking around is the normal gameplay so they just get both done at the same time.

Maybe Dear Esther is to blame for my misgivings in the genre, because I felt that Dear Esther was an improper balance of gameplay to being talked at and the location too far removed from anything to give me any sort of lasting impact. I fully accept that maybe I just didn’t “get it”, but pretty much all I remember of Dear Esther is being bored and the ending. Gone Home at least utilized its environment effectively and offered one or two — incredibly simple — puzzles. Vanishing does manage to go one step further and actually make itself a game centered entirely around exploration and puzzle solving, though the puzzles are sometimes a little far between.

You play as Paul Prospero, a private investigator with the ability to see into the past, sent to find out what happened to Ethan Carter, who has been missing for some time now. This takes you to a stretch of woods where you both follow the trail of what seems to be a series of murders plus something even more. The woods and mountains and the nearby settlements make up most of the game’s open world, in which you can solve most of the puzzles in any order as you will most likely stumble across them. The game has 10 “puzzles” overall and odds are that by the time the endgame comes you will have missed or forgotten to finish one of them. Half the puzzles have you straight up solving murders, the others are a bit more surreal in how they play out. And these are where the game truly shines.

More than anything else, Vanishing is a game about imagination and how powerful it can be for some. This is used both positively and negatively, though more on the positive side. From solving murders to awe-inducing displays of fancy that I really don’t want to spoil for those interested in playing the game, Vanishing is a visual treat. The folks at The Astronauts have really put together a staggering amount of eye candy into their game and you would be hard-pressed to call it an indie game as a result. While it does share the same problems most Unreal 3 engine games do — noticeable texture pop in and screen tearing being the most egregious — the game is simply beautiful to behold, even on my aging PC. And it’s not only forests and decrepit buildings to show off, but I don’t want to say more on that front.

The focus on imagination does manage does tend to hurt the story a bit. While it allows for some excellent set pieces, most players will figure out the ending well in advanced as a result. The script, while good, reads entirely as self-aggrandizement. Ethan Carter could be a stand in for every single one of the developers involved. This isn’t entirely a bad thing, I too love and appreciate the power imagination holds and more often than not in this game is used to powerful effect. But when concerned with the main plot it’s hard to take the ending as anything other than a “woe is me for being the misunderstood artist” or “take that, mom/dad.”

But don’t let that sour the experience of a mostly wonderful game. Maybe even more so than it’s contemporaries, Vanishing tends to be more visually-orientated than it is worried about the script. Whereas Gone Home might have gotten a little too heavy handed with its script Vanishing has considerably less dialogue and inner monologue. And while most of it is directed toward building a very unnerving  atmosphere, the visuals help Vanishing as much as they do Gone Home. Vanishing also has a payoff in that regard as well.

It may be a bit steep at $20, it took me a little over twice as long to finish as Gone Home, but the end result is one that is hard to complain with. If I had to sum up the game in a thought, it would be that the game pleasantly surprised me more than once.

Gone Home

I’ve let myself stew in the afterglow of having played Gone Home for almost two weeks now and I still cannot seem to form a clear opinion of it. It’s not uniquely built in a way that separates it from its contemporaries yet feels as though it manages to glue its elements together in a much more effective way. It’s not an exciting game, but it is an unnerving one.

Gone Home, for the uninitiated, is a walking simulator from the Fullbright Company. When 17-year-old Kaitlin returns home (a different home, as the family moved while she was away) after a year long trip around the world, she finds the home empty. Hoping to piece together what happened to everyone, she slowly explores the house looking for clues all the while unfolding just what exactly has been going on in her families’ lives for the past year.

Calling the game a “walking simulator” may sound disingenuous but rest assured that I mean it in the nicest way possible. Compared to the de facto walking simulator Dear Esther, Gone Home is much more interactive in all the right ways. While both games are pretty much straight lines, in Dear Esther you never feel like you are doing anything but pushing forward. Meanwhile, in Gone Home, the smallest bit of exploration and self-discovery leads to a much more fulfilling experience.

But those looking for complex systems or mechanics, stay far away. Gameplay-wise Gone Home offers little outside walking around an empty house, rummaging through your families’ belongings and being talked at by audio logs narrated by your sister. It’s a point-and-click adventure game without puzzles and full control over the character’s movement. Nearly every item lying around can be interacted with, but almost none of them do anything useful. In a sense, it is both the perfect Let’s Play game and not. The game will play out the same way every time but there is enough variation within the little things that no one would be able to play through the game the same way, not unless your only goal were to beat it as fast as possible.

Which you really shouldn’t. If there is one place this game shines, it is the immaculate sense of setting and unease. While being a relatively grounded affair, as you explore the house it becomes apparent that something is not quite what it seems. You’ll hear the house creak on it’s own and voices whispering from down hallways. DVD and CD player’s will be missing and seemingly normal doors will be locked, cutting off entire halves of the house. While never out and out horror, the entire game is still wrapped in a deep sense of foreboding, that the worst that could have happened may have actually happeed.

This makes the main draw of the game solving the mystery, of which the answer will be pieced together through each newspaper clipping or diary entry you read. Most of you may already know that Gone Home’s central focus is on Kaitlin’s sister Sam (the actual main character) and her burgeoning first relationship, but there are other stories happening concurrently. Each member of the family is going through something secret and there are even hints that the previous owner of the house, one Oscar Mason, you father’s uncle, might still be haunting the place. But unfortunately this is one of the few places that I feel the game fails to hold up.

Not the simultaneous stories, mind you. Gone Home practically requires them with so little else going on. No, what it comes down to for me is the writing. Whether intentional on the part of the developers to sound like a teenage girl’s Tumblr or LiveJournal or not, the writing isn’t great. It’s not bad, just naively poetic. And when I mean writing I mean Sam, from which we find out most of what has been going on. Maybe I’m just an asshole who finds high school romances little more than overactive hormones at work, but most of the diary entries detailing Sam’s love life read like, well, a teenage girl’s. I’ll admit this helps flesh her out more as a character, but doesn’t really sell me on that the fact that she has a future in creative writing like the game wants me to believe.

The other major problem I have with the game lies with expectations. Without giving too much away, when you start the game you will immediately form an idea of what happened in your mind. That idea is likely entirely correct. The rest of the game involves confusing or muddling that point with extra information that makes you think something more is going on but just never comes about. I actually find it rather clever they way the developers played with my expectations and genre-savvy, but I definitely ended the game with a “That’s it?”. It does take away from the bite of the mystery when the most logical conclusion is the correct one.

But for Gone Home (as with all stories) it’s more about the journey than the destination. And the journey is certainly an engaging one. In the 90 minutes it will take you to beat this game you’ll come across fear, hope, sadness, elation, anger, and triumph. Gone Home may not be my cup of tea, but I am happy that it exists. It’s a simple game and delivers on what it promises, no more, no less. And given how few games tend to do that nowadays, that alone is something to be thankful for.