“This game is a narrative experience that will not hold your hand”.

Those are the opening words which greet the player as they take their first tentative steps into the beautifully rendered world of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a first-person adventure title available now on Steam.

The pretentious start made me instantly want to dislike the game. Pointing out the fact the game won’t hold your hand like it is some amazing statement of intent in an industry of games that mommy-coddle is an incredibly arrogant thing to do.

Things did not improve much when the gravelly voiced protagonist, the occult detective Paul Prospero, began spouting clichés about this case being his last and what not.

However, it’s hard to think negatively towards a game as beautiful as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. There’s something in the faithfulness in which it depicts familiar surroundings that helps it transcend the visuals of most other games. The graveyard in particular felt like a snapshot from one my memories, strewn with decaying monuments to the long dead and overgrown with weeds.

Paul Prospero was called to the picturesque rural village because (SPOILER ALERT) Ethan Carter, a ten year old boy, has vanished.  For months before his disappearance, Ethan was in correspondence with Paul, who felt moved to ensure his safety.

To investigate the disappearance, Paul can uncover memories of past events by piecing together evidence and concluding what occurred and where. In practice, this involves the player combing the pretty environments in search of suspicious looking objects.

The game prides itself on giving the player no direction whatsoever, which looks like a bold premise on paper, but which raises a few issues. It took me a frankly embarrassing amount of time just to figure out some of the game’s basic mechanics.

It’s also very vague about whether progress is being made, meaning that I skipped massive chunks of the content, only to be informed by a handy wall-chart towards the climax of the game that if I wanted an end to the story, I’d have to go back through the world and solve a few more puzzles.

For the most part, the search for Ethan Carter is a sinister affair, recounting the atrocities committed by a community in the grip of a supernatural evil. It even has the odd moment that really frightens.

I say for the most part, because the ending is a complete disappointment, which re-contextualises the entire game and makes all those occult-flavoured findings seem pointless. The story builds and builds to this amazingly bombastic climax that doesn’t happen. Instead, we get a rejected M. Night Shyamalan twist.

One positive aspect of the twist is that it did give the developers complete artistic licence to do whatever they felt like. The result is a few amazing, and often jarringly out-of-place, moments that really stick with the player long after the game finishes (I’m thinking of the bit with the astronaut, for those of you who have played it).

Despite the odd moment of excellence, I found myself increasingly annoyed by the aforementioned lack of ‘hand-holding’, as if giving the player direction of any kind is a cardinal sin. This is an exemplar of a wider problem with those of us who play video games. It seems that gamers clamber over one another to heap praise on a game if it ‘doesn’t hold the player’s hand’.

Well, sometimes it’s nice to have a hand to hold, like when I was wandering around for hours in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, bored out of my mind, looking for the set of objects that allowed me to progress. I’m not saying I wanted constant hints and tutorials plaguing the screen, but there has to be a middle ground, surely?

The ‘lack of hand-holding’ that everybody seems to love so much comes with a massive sacrifice of pacing. There’s a well-told story at the heart of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, but due to the sheer amount of time I spent having no clue what to do, there were significant stretches separating revelations.

It’s like reading an absorbing book that makes you stop reading after each page so you can go find and solve a Rubik cube hidden somewhere within a mile radius. The temptation to stop playing was constant, and that’s not a good sign.

Despite the lacklustre conclusion and terrible narrative pacing, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter still tells an engaging and disturbing story which is astonishingly brought to life by the outstanding visuals. If only I’d had a hand to intermittently hold whilst playing it. A finger would have done. Or even just an ill-tempered nudge in the right direction.

6/10

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