The scene of the crime is a suitably grisly affair. A bloody smear on the side of an engine stood on the tracks of a rickety and insecure looking bridge is just the preface to a horrific and bloody murder. When you find a pair of severed legs left on the tracks, several metres away from the mess that is the rest of the victim’s body, it’s superficially obvious what has happened.
Yet the why isn’t quite so clear to start off with, and as Paul Prospero investigates the simply gorgeous environment of Red Creek Valley, he takes it upon himself to unravel the mysteries that surround the titular Ethan Carter’s disappearance. Luckily, he has the ability to tap into the supernatural and piece together events in such a way as to discover the true reasons and context behind a crime scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx8i_AssTAY
Exploring the world, items are highlighted as Prospero approaches them, but if something is missing from the scene, his internal thoughts manifest themselves on screen in a visually arresting flurry of words and phrases that quickly appear and disappear without the need to resort to his gruff voice and internal monologue. Discovering a hand crank to be missing from the front of the train engine leads to a swarm of “Crank?” on the screen, and it’s quite obvious that this is something you need to find.
Thanks to the game’s complete lack of handholding and explanation, what’s not immediately clear is that turning on the spot starts to resolve the shifting morass of words into a single form, as you start to look in the direction of the object. Pinpointing it then gives you a vision of its location and its place within the world through the game’s iconic orange bordered portals, so that you might better find it, even if it’s a few minutes walk away.
However, piecing together a series of events requires a little more exploration and more thought. Hunt through the area to find the murder tool, clues as to who was there and other parts. It’s only through discovering these parts that Prospero can interact with the soul or ghost of the deceased in an effort to learn more about what followed the murder, but first, he has to prove that you have understood what has happened before.
With all the clues collected, you can enter a kind of etherial world, with the colours draining as ghostly visages come to populate the area in various locations. In one spot, an old man argues with a younger one – the one whose dismembered corpse lies on the floor – elsewhere the same old guy reaches into a tree stump, while further up the tracks the young man ties a boy to the tracks. It’s up to you to determine the order in which these played out before the deceased will reveal its secret.
Yet, wandering off the beaten path brings even more mysteries and surreal encounters. A deadly looking man trap waits to spring up from the ground when you get near, allowing you the glimpse some small parts of a vision that refuse to resolve, while an oddly incongruous set of TV screens in the middle of the woods requires that you press them in the right order, before something truly bizarre and otherworldly appears before you.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter has already received its fair share of praise with its release on PC last year. However, a PS4 version has long been on the cards, and brings with it a move from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 4 – which will also come back to the PC version in the future. On a purely technical level, it’s a better game engine with more tools aimed directly at the kind of open world in which the game is set, and it looks simply gorgeous.
However, while Polish developers The Astronauts are looking at tweaking some elements of item discoverability, for example, this will very much be the same critically acclaimed game, the same wonderful setting and the same engrossing and mysterious story.