The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

Fair warning before we start: This review will contain spoilers. It’s sad to say, but they’re almost unavoidable when writing about this game. Everything is story relevant.

I’m going to open this review on an entirely honest note and say that I had absolutely no idea what to expect from The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. As I sat through the few hours’ unexpected delay before indy developer The Astronauts’ game went live, I was faced with the dual anxieties of ‘what if the game has gone horribly wrong and it’s not being released for six more years’ (what can I say, Final Fantasy XV has really burned me – a few hours of delay is nothing compared to what some developers will put you through) and ‘what if when it is released it isn’t the well-tuned, fascinating horror-adventure game that I kind of hastily assumed it would be.’ With the game having gotten enough pre-orders to put it in Steam’s top ten that week, ahead of Final Fantasy XIII, I probably wasn’t the only one wringing my hands at that point.

What I got was, um. Er. Okay, who else here has played Myst? Probably most of us, and those of us who haven’t will have heard about it. In the unlikely event that the Myst franchise passed you by, here’s a quick summary: You are in a large, beautiful, photo realistic and, ultimately, empty area. Why are you there? Who knows. What are you meant to do? The game isn’t saying. You’ve been dropped into the setting and now you have to figure out what to do, with no guidance of any sort.

Ethan Carter isn’t quite that extreme, but its built in the same shape as those iconic games. You know why you’re there: You’re an occult detective named Paul Prospero and you’re here following up on a letter sent to you by a young boy, Ethan. While your guidance is minimal, and the touch of the developers’ hand in that regard is noticeably light, you are given a little bit of nudging, with the first ‘case’ you have to solve being dumped right into your path, and the first ‘story’ you have to experience being pretty close by as well.

I’m talking about ‘cases’ and ‘stories’ because those, in essence, form the entirety of the game. Set down within a beautiful sandbox, made with ‘photogremmetry’ techniques involving (to simplify matters rather) feeding a bunch of photographs into a program until it spits out a three-dimensional model, it quickly becomes apparent that you have to follow the trail of murder cases. With each case, you peer at various items around the area, then wander around in a ghostly otherworld revealing and then ordering spectral manifestations of events, until you’ve figured out precisely how the murder happened.

The stories work similarly, but they tend to be a lot less signposted and a lot more surreal. For one, you might literally never find it if you don’t take a specific turn in a slightly labyrinthine mine, and then persevere past the angry zombie miner beyond. For another, you need to use portals to swap the rooms in a house. Each story culminates in the surreal, to the point where the first time I encountered a story I wondered if I had accidentally tripped a joke ending and would have to play through the whole thing again.

It’s very obvious when you’re playing it that this is an indie game, and an indie game by a pretty small company, as well. It has some of the most bare bones gameplay I’ve seen in a long time, there’s a miniscule cast of characters, and the sandbox is, on balance, very small. But The Astronauts never pretended it wasn’t an indie game, and it more than achieves its goal of creating awe and fright, with sections like the stealth section through the mines being absolutely terrifying. It’s also gorgeous: The aforementioned photogremmetry, and the effort that The Astronauts must have put into working with that technology, have produced graphics that are stunning, not just for an indie game but for any video game. Combine that with an excellent soundtrack and an engaging story, and you can easily see why Ethan Carter has picked up such a large cult following in such a short time.

I personally found the ending a little disappointing, but that’s just a personal opinion, and the friend I was playing it with greatly enjoyed the ending. Nobody could say it wasn’t foreshadowed, that’s for sure, and the road to it was a lot of fun, even if it was also befuddling and bewildering at times.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter would definitely be in my top ten games for the year, and it’s certainly one of the most daring. It’s a great example of indie games coming into their own as a big alternative to triple A games, too, which can only be a good thing.

(I’m still annoyed that they nerfed the sniper rifle, though.)

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter can be found on Steam for a mere $19.99 if you’re from the US, or £14.99 if you’re from the UK. It comes with my strong recommendation, especially if you’re a gamer who likes a bit of variety: You’re unlikely to see another game like it for a while.