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1. Can you die in the vanishing of ethan carter how to#
2. Can you die in the vanishing of ethan carter full#

Can you die in the vanishing of ethan carter how to#

So committed is it to not holding your hand that it’s actually possible to miss the gameplay entirely, mistaking the game for one of the “walking simulators” idiots get up in arms about. There’s actually a fair amount of gameplay here - puzzles, light stealth, the aforementioned narrative-building - but it’s unclear how to play most of it. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter opens with a message that bears an air of superiority - this is “a narrative experience that doesn’t hold your hand.” It’s not kidding. Ethan’s hellish childhood is the awful heart of this game. There’s a lot to be found in the use of a child’s imagination here, bringing to mind the best parts of Among the Sleep. Ethan’s world is one where a shack can be a spaceship and moonshine a magic potion where a crazed relative becomes a hungry zombie where the truth is scarier than the fiction. Ethan’s stories have the trappings of science fiction and horror, but they’re tinged with a dark undercurrent of truth, revealing their roots in the actual horror that surrounds him. But most intriguing are Ethan’s stories - the stories that you experience and uncover, the stories that brought you to this town in the first place. There are the little tableaus you assemble through your detective work, which in turn reveal the larger story of what happened to Ethan, his family, and his town. There are whispers of “the sleeper,” some kind of creature that lurks beneath the ground, but it’s all a story - one only needs look to the suspicious mines that open into the water supply to guess the source of the crazy.Įthan Carter is all about stories, and the stories the townsfolk invent to excuse their own violence are just the tip of the iceberg. There are supernatural weird-fiction elements - aliens, necromancy, a Cthulhoid monster - but they’re just metaphors for a more insidious evil: the very real insanity and paranoia that seems to have gripped the townsfolk. Through your investigations, you uncover an ugly history of madness and distrust.

Can you die in the vanishing of ethan carter full#

It’s certainly a ghost town now, full of burned-out houses, derelict traps, and decaying corpses. It’s blunt in its approach, but it’s a decent enough metaphor for detective work, once you get into it.Īnd what events you’ll piece together! I still don’t know precisely what went down in Ethan Carter’s riverside hometown, but I know that it was bad. You piece together the chronology of events, for the most part, by literally piecing together the chronology of events - a gameplay mechanic that requires more storytelling than reflexes. Think of it as a horror-driven version of Gone Home or Dear Esther and you get an idea of the tone. Supernatural detective, actually, as your investigation into the town’s unpleasant history - and the whereabouts of Ethan - takes a decidedly spectral form. Visiting a derelict rural town on the written request of young Ethan Carter, you are Paul Prospero, detective. But the air isn’t just thick with particulate - there’s omen and portent in that atmosphere, heralding a story and a game that succeed and fail in unexpected ways. The permanent magic-hour lighting and swaying greenery are both realistic and expressionistic all at once, the air billowing with volumetric dust and haze. It’s not just a matter of polygons pushed - its fields, forests and abandoned buildings are painterly. Straight-up: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is probably the most beautiful game I have ever played.