The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Part Two
Mar. 26th, 2016 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThis game doesn't deserve its ending. I suppose it's a surprise ending, but there's no payoff from any foreshadowing. In fact, the entirety of the foreshadowing is that the story sucks. If I understand what's going on correctly, the player-character, Paul Prospero, is some half-baked supernatural noir detective fantasy made up by Ethan Carter. As Ethan is suffocating to death in a fire, he either hallucinates Prospero or imagines himself as Prospero, who navigates the area around Ethan's house while investigating clues from a preposterous mystery. In other words, the fact that the mystery is clichéd and disconnected, poorly written, and sloppily characterized is apparently supposed to serve as the foreshadowing that the game takes place in the mind of a twelve-year-old boy.
If I were writing this game, I would do two things. First, I would make a clearer connection between the stories Ethan reads and the stories Ethan writes. The stories Ethan writes, which the player receives in the form of scraps of paper hidden around the game, are crappy fairy tales that make no sense. What I would do is to make it clear that they are homages to the pulp fiction of the 1960s and 1970s by (a) having them read more like earnest fanfiction, and (b) putting them in relative proximity to the sort of pulpy paperbacks and magazines that would have inspired them. Second, I would have relied more on allegory to give depth to the diegetic world Prospero inhabits. The story we get is that Ethan's family becomes possessed by a dark force that feeds on their pain and hatred and demands the sacrifice of their youngest son. What I would like to have seen are more allusions to the "pain" and "hatred" of Ethan's family in the real world. For all the player knows, Ethan's family could be perfectly normal and happy people, and Ethan is turning them into monsters in Prospero's story just because he can – which is regrettably shallow.
I went through the game not really caring what shitty and poorly explained murder scene would pop up next, and it took me almost until the end of the game to realize how the characters were related to one another. In an ideal scenario, the player would be able to figure out early on that the story is about Ethan's family, and we would see interactions between them that contain more emotional valence than "Person A hits Person B over the head with a rock." And then, as the player gradually uncovered clues that these interactions are filtered through the various tropes of pulp fiction, the events and objects in the game would begin to take on symbolic weight.
There's no denying that the world of the game is very beautiful; but, as things stand, it feels very empty. According to the PS4 Trophies achievement rate, only about 40% of players bothered to finish the game, even despite the fact that it costs $20 and can be completed in less than three hours. I guess I'm not the only one who felt that the pretty scenery doesn't justify the lack of a coherent narrative.
If I were writing this game, I would do two things. First, I would make a clearer connection between the stories Ethan reads and the stories Ethan writes. The stories Ethan writes, which the player receives in the form of scraps of paper hidden around the game, are crappy fairy tales that make no sense. What I would do is to make it clear that they are homages to the pulp fiction of the 1960s and 1970s by (a) having them read more like earnest fanfiction, and (b) putting them in relative proximity to the sort of pulpy paperbacks and magazines that would have inspired them. Second, I would have relied more on allegory to give depth to the diegetic world Prospero inhabits. The story we get is that Ethan's family becomes possessed by a dark force that feeds on their pain and hatred and demands the sacrifice of their youngest son. What I would like to have seen are more allusions to the "pain" and "hatred" of Ethan's family in the real world. For all the player knows, Ethan's family could be perfectly normal and happy people, and Ethan is turning them into monsters in Prospero's story just because he can – which is regrettably shallow.
I went through the game not really caring what shitty and poorly explained murder scene would pop up next, and it took me almost until the end of the game to realize how the characters were related to one another. In an ideal scenario, the player would be able to figure out early on that the story is about Ethan's family, and we would see interactions between them that contain more emotional valence than "Person A hits Person B over the head with a rock." And then, as the player gradually uncovered clues that these interactions are filtered through the various tropes of pulp fiction, the events and objects in the game would begin to take on symbolic weight.
There's no denying that the world of the game is very beautiful; but, as things stand, it feels very empty. According to the PS4 Trophies achievement rate, only about 40% of players bothered to finish the game, even despite the fact that it costs $20 and can be completed in less than three hours. I guess I'm not the only one who felt that the pretty scenery doesn't justify the lack of a coherent narrative.
