The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Seems to be pretty much Murdered Soul Suspect but with a much better reception. There's quite a few 9/10's floating around out there, I'm intrigued.

I'm very interested—I have it on my wishlist over on GOG. From what I've gathered, your description of "Murdered: Soul Suspect", but better, seems to be somewhat accurate.

Hopefully it's better. As someone who's actually watched a Let's Play of Murdered, I'm not really a fan of how the "investigation" mechanic works.

Heh, likewise: I've also seen Let's Plays of Murdered, and it really does seem to have gone for a somewhat simplistic approach, to the point of sometimes making investigations more difficult by virtue of clue-usage (such as in the "influence" mechanic) being counter-intuitively direct and basic.

Yeah, the story was...alright...but the investigations were too easy because it was just "walk around an area. Gather clues. Assemble clues together." There was also how the ending confrontation went.

Objective: Stop Abigail. No indicator on how to do it.

Ok, so I caved and bought it off of steam and thus far there's been a refreshing number of surprises. I was already hooked when I pieced together the first murder-scene (which seems to hint at some sort of eldritch abomination plot), but when I got to chasing a space-man through the forest and ended up getting abducted by aliens and piecing together a trans-dimensional labyrinth in a run-down shack I was officially impressed.

I only have two niggles, while not a bad thing in itself the two latter puzzles were very trial-and-error in nature, and when you failed you had to manually traipse your way all the way back to the starting point to try again, which is tedious. The other one is that there's no map of any sort and lots of very scenic but nonetheless empty dead-ends, some indicator of how much there is to do in an area would've been nice.

Also the soundtrack is outstanding, as are the visuals, it's quite a bit like Dear Es- ...uh, Skyrim, in that regard.

edited 2nd Oct '14 3:38:29 PM by LE0Night

Ok, I went to the mine and I solved the Drowning Elevator Woman murder. I took the Mine Cart further and found a staircase going down. I went down and through a gate which had a warning note on it and... There was some zombie man there who... killed me? And I respawned outside the gate. I'm not sure where I'm going then. I am I on the right trail or is the game telling me 'come back later'?

edited 2nd Oct '14 4:02:30 PM by lancesolous13

It's like the puzzle with the house and the spaceman in that it's another one of Ethan's stories come to life, so basically another side mission. You're supposed to track down corpses in the maze without being detected, when you "sense" one it'll send one of those blue lights into the deepest part of the maze. There they'll tell you a letter of the name of some Eldritch Abomination thing and you have to put those into the gate that'll summon him. Here's◊ the solution to the gate if you'd rather not spend too much time in the maze.

edit: Just got out of the mine and now I'm stuck myself. Was legitimately awed by the scenery, though.

edited 3rd Oct '14 6:59:50 PM by LE0Night

only thing I didn't like about the game was the inability to manually save. a couple of times I found myself having to either leave the pc on overnight/when out for the day, be late to bed/appointment or have to start a section again later. especially frustrating on the lower mine section (I ended up just using a spoiler and not finding all the bodies myself) other than that though I loved the game all the way through. the atmosphere and lonely, foreboding feeling is perfect and reminded me a lot of Scratches with a bit of Gone Home

If anyone wants to fill the Trope page, I'll leave the link here: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

edited 22nd Oct '14 10:28:47 AM by Sayer09

Unreal 4 version out July 14th for PS4, PC owners will get a free update