201 - The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

[matt]

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a really interesting game that was released recently. While it's a good and popular and game, I had trouble with the LACK of hand-holding, which is a touted feature of the game. I give my thoughts on why the game didn't quite work for me (maybe I just suck).

[RightClickSaveAs]

I think I liked the game more than you, but I am so with you on the points you talk about. It helped that I'm really methodical when I play through a game, so I found pretty much everything I needed to just by exploring everywhere on the first run, but if you don't finish all the puzzles before you get to the end you have to go back and find them...

The save system was definitely a pain. I didn't play through it in one sitting either, and I ended up finding out the hard way that it actually uses a checkpoint save system. It will only save after you solve a puzzle, basically. Before they patched it, it wouldn't even say anything about saving on the screen.

And then that damn map, ahaha. I also did the preorder and ended up checking out the map at the end because I was stuck. I'd avoided it before because of SPOILERS, but YES, it's just a map of the valley with no names or locations written on it! Even with the puzzle locations marked on there in the Super Spoiler Edition, it still tells you nothing! It just has X marks and some even less helpful question marks to note the general location of the puzzles.

If the puzzle you're talking about is the one with the rooms of the house, I feel you on that one. It was worse for me because I ended up solving it just through trial and error, I had no idea you could even go to another place and figure out the layout from there, because the puzzle location comes up before the other location. That's one of the reasons why the game took me longer than the average to get through.

I don't know if you got to the end or not, but the worst puzzle was definitely further on. It involves a sort of maze and a random enemy encounter that almost made me quit. Instead I looked up the puzzle solution and just blew past it because it was terrible.

I don't feel it really hit on the "weird fiction" part as much as I'd hoped it would. There's a couple overt references to Lovecraftian mythology, but mostly it was just the sad and somewhat disturbing story of a family, with some fantastical elements involved.

It definitely made some mistakes, and a lot of them had to do with the touted lack of "handholding". Some people maybe enjoy that more than I do, I've never liked Myst (or especially Riven) all that much either because of the aggravation factor of the puzzles.

[matt]

I did finish the game, and I also used a walkthrough on the puzzle you mentioned (along with pretty much everything). It seemed really out of place to introduce ONE enemy all of a sudden towards the end of the game. I found all the corpses with the walkthrough, but I just copied the answer because I was also sick of that section. hahah

I think I would have had a better impression of the game if the storytelling were better, but the overall story wasn't super interesting to me, and because you could solve the puzzles in any order, they couldn't really build tension or make the story more interesting as time passes. Gone Home had a really clever solution for making the story reveal linearly even though you had control over the exploration.

It was pretty though!