"Narrative" implies direction, pacing, momentum and drama. The game definitely gets the "won't hold your hand" part right, but this isn't a narrative experience.
But much of your time in Ethan Carter will be spent wandering, dismally, trying to unearth the next chip of story. It's a novel way to structure a game and, I guess, a valid response to that question about developer against player. Once you've found and decrypted all of these incidents, and slotted together the game's story, you hit a button and the end cutscene rolls. You may, for example, come across a dead body and can then spend time finding the murder weapon, moving objects around and piecing together the chronology of events to decipher and display exactly what happened. You have access to Ethan Carter's entire open-world from the start and there are ten "scenes" for you to find and explore. I think The Astronauts have confused vagueness, or contrariness, with sophistication. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter: A beautiful game featuring European architecture and lush forests The Astronauts Wells or Edgar Allen Poe novel, two things which, incidentally, you can find stacked on a desk in one of the houses you explore. The name is a dead giveaway - "The Vanishing of Ethan Carter." It's been chosen to make the game sound like an H.G. Ethan Carter is definitely something I can keep in reserve for when that argument inevitably comes up again, but as a standalone work, it's minor – it's very childish.īut still, somehow, it's incredibly pretentious. Even the aforementioned discussion about player versus maker has been dealt with previously, and more skilfully, in games such as Journey and Dear Esther. But The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is such a slight, inoffensive, timid little game that I can't think of a better word than boring. I hate using the word "boring" to describe artwork – I feel like any art, no matter how drab, can never truly be boring, because even if you're discussing how boring it is, it's still achieved one of its key objectives: to inflame. It's proof that if the developer takes a back seat, minimises his presence, and lets the audience go where it wants, the results will be confused, insubstantial, and for the large part dull. I admire Ethan Carter as an experiment, and I'm grateful to it: in the argument over directorial intent versus player freedom, this game has provided me ammunition to argue for the former. "This game is a narrative experience which does not hold your hand." The Vanishing of Ethan Carter opens with that disclaimer and for better or worse, it sticks to its guns.
THE VANISHING OF ETHAN CARTER. PS4
Platforms – Windows PC, PS4 (launch in 2015).