The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

nice game and if you like What Remains of Edith Finch then you should like this

[b]DISCLAIMER: This is a review of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux, a DLC overhaul of the original game which is intended to improve it. Total play time at the writing of this review was 4.1 hours.[/b] The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is better left unfound. [h1]Story[/h1] Hollow, uninteresting, and meaningless. Players take on the role of Paul Prospero, a 1970's freelance detective with supernatural powers that give him the ability to rebuild and witness crime scenes exactly as they happened after he has placed enough arbitrary objects in their original positions before the crime took place. He has been summoned to Red Creek Valley by a letter from the titular Ethan who has since gone missing, and it isn't long before Paul stumbles upon a grisly murder scene of someone close to Ethan. What follows after that is a whole lot of wandering around and stumbling across yet more murders. Each one seems to involve a member of his family being manipulated by something called The Sleeper. As you play, you'll come across some small insights into his troubled relationship with his family, and the incredibly short fictional stories he seems to have spent most of his time writing before he disappeared. The narrative itself is delivered as dry as a salted cracker and about as thick as one too. Despite all of the murders, nothing about any of the character interactions have anything of substance to latch onto, and the limp attempt at a twist in the game's final moments sucks whatever fleeting crumbs of intrigue the story might still have possessed right out of it before ending on a note of utter nothingness. There isn't a single interesting character in the game, nor is the story itself all that interesting. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] Walking and clicking on things. That's it. Sure there's a crouch button that the game will make you use once during it's entire run time. There's a sprint button that doesn't seem to serve any actual purpose other than letting you get through the utterly empty world a little faster. But beyond that, there's nothing you can do except click on the things the developers let you click on, designated every single time by the massive floating text above the object. Most doors may as well be walls unless the word "OPEN" is floating in front of them. Most objects may as well not exist unless a words is floating above them. Every single possible action the player can take in the game is completely scripted and literally labeled in giant glowing letters. It makes the world feel like a sterile theme park rather than an living, breathing world. "Gameplay" is largely comprised of stumbling around the world until you find a crime scene, then stumbling around the crime scene (and some times dozens of yards away from it with nothing to indicate you'd need to go that way) until you've found all of the arbitrarily designated items in the scene and put them back where they belong. In the very first crime scene, one of these important items is literally just a fist sized rock. In a rocky mountainous forest. FILLED WITH ROCKS! Once you've put the scene back together, you can touch the body and small sprites will fan out from it to create small snapshots in time from different moments in the murder, at which point you have to set the proper chronology of events in place before being allowed to watch them play out. Do that same thing over and over again several times and you reach the end of the game. Besides the murder scenes, players can also find Ethan's stories scattered across the map. Each one involves some exceedingly simple logic puzzle to complete, or just more wandering around to find all the relevant items too it. These stories are necessary to beat the game, and seemingly realizing that players may not wish to back track for very easy to miss pieces of paper, the ending of the game randomly introduced a fast travel teleport system between the stories and the end game area; as if things didn't feel artificial enough already. Put simply, the game isn't fun to play and frankly stretches the definition of "play" far beyond its intended usage. [h1]Presentation[/h1] A mixed bag across the board. At its absolute best, TVoEC is genuinely gorgeous. The Wisconsin river valley it takes place in is permanently picturesque no matter where you're standing in it at any given moment. The composition of the scenes combined with the dense use of detailed objects and superb lighting all combine with some sincerely mesmerising atmospheric sound design to create a the kind of place you just want to live in for the rest of your life. But as the game goes on, the cracks start to form and start to widen. The sound design, while appealing in content, was botched in execution, causing strange audio issues like being able to hear as motor running through 30 feet of earth as if it were sitting right next to you, or rushing water blasting out of a damn that's full volume when you're near it and suddenly silent when you step five feet further away from it. The visuals take a nasty hit as well for a while when you enter the mine beneath the valley as the game trades out the luxuriously hand crafted surface world for stark, empty tunnels that repeat the exact same assets again and again and again. Characters are a bit rough and you see them so little that it can difficult at first to remember who is who. Animation isn't anything to write home about but it gets the job done. The voice acting however, is just as hollow as the story itself. Every single actor sounds bored 95% of the time, with no real sense of voice direction or emotion. The music is almost as bland. So much of it blends together as generic "pensive mystery music" that the few songs which break the mold stand out more just by being different than by being interesting or good. The execution of the music is also subpar. It never feels like it's scoring the moment and the players actions, but rather like it's just on a loop until you finish doing whatever you're doing, leading to some songs featuring random stingers that play for no reason while leaving the player wondering if the music is just looping, or if something just happened that they failed to notice.