Leave Only Traces

A boy named Ethan Carter's gone missing, but not before he sent a letter to Paul Prospero, supernatural detective. So in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, it's your job to find Ethan. Failing that, learn what happened to him.

The game tells you up front that it will not, 'hold your hand.' Which is certainly true. There's only so far you can wander in any given direction, but within those bounds, it's up to you to figure out what you're supposed to be looking for. The game will, if there's something to interact with, put a word above said object. Like "Read", or "Push." When it turns orange, you're close enough to do whatever the action is.

But you have to find those things first. Early on, I wandered into an abandoned house. There was a scrap of paper on a table. I read it, and all the doorways gained a blue outline. When I started to enter one, the room beyond would change. Sometimes I'd walk through and everything would be fine. Others, there was a red flash and I end up back at the start.

Eventually I figured out that it was somehow mirroring the larger house next door. I needed to walk through that house to learn the layout, then go back to the first house and make my way from room to room, only stepping through the doorway when the room I saw matched the one I would have seen from that spot in the larger house, until I'd gone through the every room, which unlocked an "alchemist's workshop." Probably actually a distillery, transformed in Ethan's imagination.

But the game was perfectly content to let me continue on without ever unlocking that whole sequence. Though I probably would have to double back to it eventually, as I had to for the first of those things. So it doesn't hold your hand (if you can call occasional guidance that), but it does erect roadblocks.

At other points you encounter a dead body. Then it's a matter of finding evidence to help piece things together. When you find something, there will often be a word cloud of different conclusions or inferences Prospero is making. Eventually he'll settle on something that will hover and blur wildly in front of you (giving me a headache.) You have to pan across your surroundings until it reduces to one clear image, at which time you can "see" the location of whatever you're looking for.

You put together enough evidence, and the game will have you reconstruct the sequence of events that led to the murder. It's similar to Sinking City in that way, though Ethan Carter's reconstructions are trickier. There's usually more steps, and unlike Sinking City, you only have the ghostly after-images to work from. There's no voiceovers until after you correctly assemble the sequence, so the first one I managed to complete took several tries.

(It wasn't the first one I'd found, but I'd eventually gotten frustrated because I clearly understood the basic construction of the murder, but the game wasn't registering it. Turns out I hadn't parked the railcar used to sever the victim's legs in exactly the right spot. Ugh.)

The game appears to revolve around Ethan having awakened something he shouldn't, which turned most of his family against him. There's a, I guess, twist to that. Depends how literally you take everything you're seeing. I was taking things pretty literally because, well, why not? A supernatural or otherworldly horror controlling a bunch of people out in the middle of nowhere wouldn't be the weirdest thing I've seen in a video game.

I can't see myself playing the game through a second time, but it wasn't a bad way to kill a few hours.