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The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Part One
Mar. 25th, 2016 08:18 amAt the very beginning of the game, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter puts text on the screen saying that it's "a narrative experience that does not hold your hand."
I was like, FUCK YOU, GAME. I WILL USE A WALKTHROUGH THEN. DON'T TELL ME HOW TO PLAY.
I appreciate that there are no artificial barriers restricting the player's movement through the game; but, without any "beaten path" to suggest clues, it's supremely easy to miss the story events. For example, one of the first puzzles involves finding a small gray crankshaft hidden between a bunch of huge gray rocks sitting on gray sand beside a gray lake. I can barely locate my own damn socks in my own tiny apartment, and even with the help of two video walkthroughs it still took me about twenty minutes to find the MacGuffin. I would have just given it up for lost, but I wasn't able to trigger the next event until I completed the previous one in the sequence. So much for not holding my hand.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is one of the most joyless games I've ever encountered. It has zero sense of humor, and the writing is atrocious. The readable text almost makes sense but doesn't quite, and the direction of the voice acting is bizarre, as if the actors were asked to fake American accents on the spot. Since I had my laptop open in front of me, I checked the Wikipedia page, and lo and behold the dev studio is Polish (for whatever that's worth). I suppose we're getting the key parts of the story through the words and visions of the eponymous Ethan Carter, a twelve-year-old kid who's just starting to break in his writing chops, but one would hope that "artistic license" would be a good excuse for mitigating some the resulting awkwardness in the game's storytelling.
I was like, FUCK YOU, GAME. I WILL USE A WALKTHROUGH THEN. DON'T TELL ME HOW TO PLAY.
I appreciate that there are no artificial barriers restricting the player's movement through the game; but, without any "beaten path" to suggest clues, it's supremely easy to miss the story events. For example, one of the first puzzles involves finding a small gray crankshaft hidden between a bunch of huge gray rocks sitting on gray sand beside a gray lake. I can barely locate my own damn socks in my own tiny apartment, and even with the help of two video walkthroughs it still took me about twenty minutes to find the MacGuffin. I would have just given it up for lost, but I wasn't able to trigger the next event until I completed the previous one in the sequence. So much for not holding my hand.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is one of the most joyless games I've ever encountered. It has zero sense of humor, and the writing is atrocious. The readable text almost makes sense but doesn't quite, and the direction of the voice acting is bizarre, as if the actors were asked to fake American accents on the spot. Since I had my laptop open in front of me, I checked the Wikipedia page, and lo and behold the dev studio is Polish (for whatever that's worth). I suppose we're getting the key parts of the story through the words and visions of the eponymous Ethan Carter, a twelve-year-old kid who's just starting to break in his writing chops, but one would hope that "artistic license" would be a good excuse for mitigating some the resulting awkwardness in the game's storytelling.
