Tag: Mystery

Game Club Plays: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Hey everyone, Scrooloose here again with another great pick for the Twinstiq Game Club. This week it's going to be The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

This is a mystery narrative title with some kind of noir elements and plenty of puzzle solving that was released in 2014. That was a mouth full I know. Ethan Carter was originally rendered in Unreal Engine 3 and is still one of most highly detailed and aesthetically beautiful games out there to date. In 2015 there was a free redux version released that used the more powerful Unreal Engine 4 and the difference is noticeable not only visibly, but also in terms of performance and various forms of refinement. Nowadays there's even a VR version of the game released as DLC. Ethan Carter is available for PC through Steam and GoG as well as for PS4 so you'll have a couple of options for playing. Sadly there is no Mac port.

vec_ue4

As said above this is a narrative title set in the first person where the player takes the role of Paul Prospero, a detective tasked to find out what happened in the game's setting, Red Creek Valley. Pretty simple in its execution The Vanishing of Ethan Carter says from the beginning that it will not hold your hand. That means a few things: Firstly, there's no real tutorial, suck it up and figure it out. Secondly, there are no forced story elements so you as the player are allowed to go as deep or as shallow in the game play as you like. Thirdly, there are no real hints aside from the clues that Paul will find via exploration.

I personally really love this game and it's worth the full price of admission. Beautiful environments, minimal loading screens, lots of exploration and puzzle solving and a pretty well told story make this one my pick for this Game Club round. It's also a relatively short game, I spent about five hours on my first play through. We at the Game Club hope you'll join us on our journey to solve The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

System Requirements for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter are as follows:

MINIMUM:

    • OS: Windows 64-bit
    • Processor: Intel Core2 Duo or equivalent AMD
    • Memory: 6 GB RAM
    • Graphics: DirectX11 compliant card with 1GB of VRAM
    • DirectX: Version 11
    • Storage: 9 GB available space
    • Sound Card: DirectX9c compliant