The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was a title I’d been keeping an eye on for awhile, but my expectations for it barred me from grabbing it at full price. I was eventually able to pick it up on sale and give it a thorough playthrough, and was glad I had waited for the discount.

I love exploring in games and knew that atmosphere here was arguably as important as the story being told so I was eager to jump in and pore over every last detail. Unfortunately, the picturesque setting was a little too life-like; and by that I mean boring. Outside of Vanishing‘s core set-pieces and very few scraps of humanity the environment was sadly lacking in anything of even passing interest. I would have loved to see a burnt-out fire pit in the woods, or initials carved into a tree that didn’t serve any direct story element but gave a sense of character, for example. Instead, my exploration went entirely unrewarded and that was a real disappointment.

As far as the actual gameplay is concerned, it basically consists of finding crimes and solving them, often using arbitrary puzzle mechanics. Find the crank, start the generator, navigate a maze. The character you embody then uses his psychic powers to recall different stages of a crime, and the player must find the correct sequence of events. Questions like why a series of grisly murders has gone wholly unnoticed by the authorities, why the detective protaganist has no concern for evidence tampering, or even the origin of these psychic powers go largely unexplained until a weak ending invalidates all of it. There’s so much potential here, but the mish-mash of, “That would be cool, let’s put that in!” just seems like an excuse to show off the gorgeous engine while legitimate storytelling takes a backseat.

But nothing here compares to the actual gameplay mechanics when it comes to disappointment. Toward the end of Ethan Carter, I had to play in shifts due to the lack of a run toggle and the fervent exploration I was doing. (There’s an option for a crouch toggle but not a run toggle?) This was made worse by the lack of a proper save feature, as the game relies entirely on auto-saves to mark your progress. Forget what you were doing or where you were going? Too bad: no inventory, no game log, no sense of direction whatsoever. I don’t mind games that take off the training wheels and let you figure things out for yourself, but good game design dictates that there will always be at least some, even subliminal, indication of what needs to be done next at any given time.

Presumably to aid immersion, developer The Astronauts eschew loading screens in favor of painfully long elevator rides or hikes through long tunnels. The section where you wade slowly through a sulphiric, bubbling passage was particularly grating. Added to the no hand-holding principle established with the game’s introduction, this made revisiting any previous location excruciating and with it negated nearly any replay value.

Surprisingly, I do think the $19.99 price is solid for this title. Although I bought it on sale, I will say that it’s worth the $20 for its seamless gameplay and initially interesting story. Despite its banality, it really is a gorgeous game with an impressive texture budget (even though its human characters certainly look plastic on account of the Unreal engine behind the scenes). If you like walking simulators and have a decent PC the visuals alone justify its price, so long as you’re not expecting anything meaningful from the story like I was.

4/10