Horror: The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter

[Paddy™]

Fantastic game. Highly recommended. I would warn against playing the game before you get the patch though; there are a few bugs which might imped your progress. The Steam version is patched as of today, but the GOG version (which is the one I have) isn't. If you, too, have the GOG version, I advise you to wait. I had to replay a few sections because of game-breaking bugs, but the game is so good that I honestly didn't mind that much, it just kinda ruins the immersion a little.

The game feels like new territory. I'm sure it's not the first game to have these kinds of mechanics (in fact, the scene in Penumbra where you have to rearrange the objects in a room to match its original state is very similar to the murder recreations in Carter), but there's something about this game that feels like a consistently "new" kind of experience. It's hard to describe, but it feels like it has rendered the last decade of video game history obsolete, much like Amnesia did when I first played it. And just as Amnesia made every other horror game seem like a warm turd, I expect Carter to make me even less tolerant of entrenched game design formulas than I already was.

Best £14.99 I've spent in a long time.

The end credits say "Special thanks to Thomas Grip (Frictional Games)"; I wonder what his contribution was. I do know that he and Adrian Chmielarz collaborated on the 4-Layer Narrative Design Approach, which is also being used for SOMA, but I wonder if he had a more direct hand in the development of Carter.