Telltale is mostly known for licensed adventure games such as The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead. They shut down and started back up, and now they probably don’t have the money to license these franchises anymore. I actually prefer this. Telltale has created their first original IP in years, and it has so much potential. The biggest takeaway from this game is the usual Telltale style of storytelling and choice-making. You think you know what you’re going to choose ahead of time and how it will pan out in your head, but things always make a left turn and change on you, and you’re left speechless. They are also, sadly, known for having almost no gameplay and very dated visuals.
Gameplay is more frequent in this game, but you just control your character in a walking simulator situation, walking or gliding down long hallways. There are a couple of elementary puzzles thrown in, and that’s your lot for gameplay. It’s fine, as I go into Telltale games for the story and characters and not much else. You can use zero-G movement in some areas and move around that way. You can also optionally scan a few items here and there for collectibles, but it’s very limited and linear in scope.
The best part about the game is the atmosphere, characters, and overall story. While this game is the beginning of a larger story arc that will give us more lore and behind-the-scenes politics on the goings-on of this world, this game solely focuses on establishing Captain Drummer as a brand new protagonist, and I love her so much. She has a lot of charisma and is a dark and brooding character without being cringy and formulaic. Her voice actress does a fantastic job portraying this. The other characters are written in your typical telltale manner, which allows you to constantly hate or like a character and then suddenly doubt everything in the end. The cast is small, but the game has a fantastic pace that keeps things interesting.
You’re essentially scrappers, and there is an established order of inners: people who live inside the astroid belt and those who love outside of the astroid belt. There are pirates involved, and there is a secret treasure that everyone is fighting over. I don’t want to go too much into the story, but the game’s atmosphere is dark and haunting, but there’s no horror. The monster here is the human element and just how brutal we can be to each other in a split second. I found the ending very satisfying, and it opens up for a clear sequel that hopefully expands this entire universe that Telltale has created.
The visuals are a huge improvement over their past games. While they aren’t ground-breaking and are required to run on previous generation hardware, the stylized visuals look great, and the blacks, whites, and grays really make you feel alone and claustrophobic all the time. The voice acting is top-notch, as always, and the only thing I left with was wanting more from this series. I also wanted more gameplay, as quick-time events are incredibly dated and there are other things you can do for adventure titles other than these dated gameplay elements. More side quests, an actual gameplay loop, and more side dialogue would be nice to be able to expand upon everything. As it is, the game takes 6-7 hours to finish, but it’s incredibly enjoyable, and I couldn’t put the game down.
Kingdom Hearts has a special place in my heart. I remember when the first game came out, and it was talked about by a lot of people on the school grounds. I was in junior high when it was released, but I didn’t get it until it was a Greatest Hits release at $20. I found it hard at the time and never finished it. When the second game came out, I rented it from GameFly and actually cried at the ending. It was so memorable and engrossing for me as a teen.
Here we are, almost 15 years later, with the third installment in the mainline series. I was insanely excited and didn’t follow any previews or reviews for the game leading up to actually getting around to buying this game. I played the first area of Hercules (again?) and got to Toy Box (Toy Story!) and lost interest. Yeah, the game hasn’t really evolved all that much. My biggest problem with Kingdom Hearts III is the lack of imaginative level design and the use of mostly modern Pixar movies. The best part about a new Kingdom Hearts game is discovering what the next Disney movie will be that you get to explore. It’s like a surprise each time, and I loved that with previous entries. This was the first time I was praying it wasn’t another modern Pixar movie.
While Hercules was very cinematic, scripted, and looked great, it’s an overused Disney movie in the series. Toy Story was exciting, especially when we were in Andy’s room, but we wound up in a generic boring mall? It was such a boring level to get through, and I didn’t feel anything like the movie. We then move on to Repunzel. Why? Another issue with this game is playing each movie scene by scene around the second act. We’re stuck at a generic forest level here. After this, we get into Monsters Inc., which is actually pretty cool, but it’s a generic monster factory. Then it’s…FROZEN?! Why Frozen? We even get a literal, scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot rendition of the “Let It Go” song. If I wanted that, I would just watch the movie. A generic snow level awaits us here.
Then we go back to Pirates of the Caribbean, of all movies. I appreciate that the visuals are improved enough to give us realistic versions of this movie and not the cartoony one we got last time, but I didn’t care as the original voice cast wasn’t present again. And it’s based off of the third film for some reason. I liked the fact that you get to sail an open ship and go find crabs to upgrade your ship, but I skipped all of this. The ship steers like a hot-wheeled car, and the generic seaside town and ship battles weren’t very interesting. Then we finally arrive at Big Hero 6, which is also pretty cool, but it’s a generic large map of San Francisco, and it is incredibly boring. That’s it. No more worlds, and you are stuck in the last level for about 10 hours doing boss rushes like every other RPG has done, and this seriously needs to stop to just bloat game time.
Even if you like or dislike these Pixar movies, the fact is that the levels are incredibly boring, and each one plays out the same way. You get through several mini-bosses, fight waves of enemies, collect some stuff, and fight the movie’s main antagonist. Every world is a generic feeling with no life from the movie injected into it. The reliance on playing through scenes of these movies isn’t what I want in a Kingdom Hearts game. I want a unique experience at each level that makes me feel like I’m part of that world. Not just some character who crashed the movie in the middle of its runtime.
I can go on and on about how much I hated the uninspired level design and repetitive nature of each world, but then there’s the Gummi Ships. I hated these in the first game, and I really don’t like them here. I like that the Gummi Ship part is a large open map that you can explore freely between worlds, but there’s nothing interesting here. You fly around collecting parts, Munni, and you can find shooter waves flying around that have levels and stars attached to them. Upgrading your ship but being able to buy parts to put together blueprints is a staple of the series, but I just don’t find it interesting. A new alpha Gummi part can be attached now to help fight in battle. It’s essentially a satellite ship flying around yours. There are speed tunnels all over the place, asteroids, and various obstacles, but I just wanted to get to the next world.
Finally, there’s the combat itself. I never really cared for Kingdom Hearts‘ combat. It works, it’s fine, and it can be fast-paced, but you fight the same Heartless over and over again, and the game is heavily reliant on keyblade transformations. Actual attacking and magic have taken a back seat. I rarely touched magic, and it felt useless. I was just attacking until I got my three pips and I could transform my keyblade into a more powerful weapon and execute its finishing move. This does the most damage and is a must for bosses, or you won’t survive at all. The final act of the game pits you against around a dozen bosses, one after another, and it’s a frustrating chore. You can still use Link commands, but they aren’t that great this time around, and I felt like they hindered battle more than anything. The goal was to attack and get a few combos in, transform my keyblade, execute attractions that put you on famous Disney park rides that do damage, and just rinse and repeat. Items are useful for sure, and it’s important to keep abilities tagged, as adding combos and modifiers to combat really gives you an edge. However, this all gets so repetitive, and you just stop caring before you get to the third world.
Then there’s the story, which I haven’t even touched on yet. It makes zero sense, even to people who have played the series up until now. My main interest was in the little stories inside each world. I never cared for the overarching Kingdom Hearts story. It’s a bloated, overcomplicated mess involving Organization XIII, and Final Fantasy isn’t even a part of this story anymore. Xehanort was the X-Blade. Aqua is trapped in a world, I think, where there are multiple versions of everyone. Yeah, I don’t know. Go watch a comprehensive timeline explanation on YouTube instead. Sadly, each world is just a retelling of each movie, which I could just go watch if I wanted to. At least the visuals are really good, and everything is bright, colorful, and full of life.
The voice acting is also hit-and-miss, but mostly terrible. Haley Joel Osment as Sora again was a bad choice; he’s just not a good voice actor. Outside of some of the mainline Disney characters, the voice acting is just wooden and awkward. Most Disney films don’t retrain their original voice actors. Especially in Pirates of the Caribbean…again. What’s worse is the writing. The script feels like it was written by a grammar school student. It’s just the most basic lines, replies, and banter. It’s just enough to get through each scene. There’s a lot of nothing being said by most of these characters. Shouting each other’s names a lot, and a lot of “You will never stop us!” or “I will defeat you!” over and over again. Yawn.
So, there’s a lot I don’t like here. The lack of older Disney movies, the complete absceneness of Final Fantasy stuff, and the fact that each movie is just a scene-by-scene replay of the original movie are boring. The levels feel generic, uninspired, and repetitive, and the combat, while flashy, uses an overreliance on keyblade transformations, attraction attacks, and links and magic. Enemies repeat far too often, and the final act is nothing but a frustrating slog of a boss rush. The story is insanely and wildly confusing and unnecessarily complicated, but at least the visuals are a nice treat. If you didn’t like previous games in the series, this does nothing that will convince you to like it now.
Side note: I was incredibly disappointed by Utada Hikaru’s song with Skrillex on this one. Both Simple and Clean and Passion/Sanctuary are classics and some of Utada’s best work. This song was terrible and wasn’t a good start to the game for me.
You play as Kai. A girl is sent away to a strange village in a post-apocalyptic world to re-connect with her extended family. You spend the entire game walking around to the various dozen or so screens, collecting seeds, planting gardens, and learning more about your past and the ties between the village and your family.
I have to give credit to the developers for their tight and well-written dialogue. The characters have, well, character. For the short time you spend in the games (under 4 hours), you really get to know these people, and the dialogue is written in a way that feels organic and like you’re listening in on a conversation. Talk of relationship issues, depression, carelessness, death, suicide, and many other emotions that we face in ourselves and amongst our own families. There’s an atmosphere that’s both uncomfortable and familiar. You will plant your own life in this game and strategize relating to certain characters or hating them. It’s just so well done.
As for the rest of the game, there’s something to be desired. As you walk around the screens, you will see a hand icon over anything you can pick up. These are usually plants, and you need the seeds to plant gardens to advance the story. There are eye icons for objects that Kai will comment on and a clock icon for an interaction that will advance the story. You never really get lost. Kai’s journal gives hints on who to talk to and what area you need to be in. Using a little common sense and learning the screens and where everyone resides helps a lot. As you pick up seeds, you learn songs that help you grow the garden. Each seed grows based on its song, so it’s recommended to plant seeds of that type. You can place the seeds with an outline of the plant that will tell you if there’s enough space for it. Sing the song a few times, plant enough seeds, and your garden grows. You can then harvest the plant for what you need to advance the story.
Don’t get this confused with something akin to Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. This isn’t a farming simulator at all. The planting and gardening are rudimentary at best and mostly uninteresting. I just threw seeds around until I filled up the meter, spammed the correct song, harvested, and off I went. I was more interested in the characters and the story. There’s a mystery behind the village that I couldn’t wait to unravel, and unfortunately, gardening got in the way. I did love the music; it’s amazing and good enough to listen to outside of the game.
The art style is well done. It’s bright and colorful, but it can be really dark when needed. The characters have unique humanoid designs that seem familiar but are still alien, and the paper cut-out look just fits so well. I just wish the story was a bit longer, as I wanted to get to know the characters more. I can’t really complain about gameplay, as you do move around constantly and patterns change and mix up, so it never really gets boring. This is a great little adventure game that can kill an evening, and you might have a new favorite OST.
2D walking simulators seem to be a whole new genre of their own, are more interesting, and tend to be better than fully 3D ones. Games like Limbo, Little Nightmares, and Inside are perfect examples of this. There is some light platforming, some puzzle solving thrown in, and maybe a little bit of stealth. While none of those had stories that blew me away, they did make up for it in atmosphere and character. Shady Part of Me sadly doesn’t accomplish any of those things. The only thing going for it is the dual-character puzzles, and that’s about it. There really isn’t even a story to speak of. Yourself, your shadow, and some disembodied voice narrate the entire game with cryptic dialogue that really is either open for translation to the player or is entirely meaningless.
This game reminds me a lot of Limbo and Lost in Shadow. You play as a little girl in a white dress who is afraid of light, and her shadow (always on the wall) is afraid of darkness. You switch between both to help each other advance. Puzzles involve pushing boxes and pulling switches, and in later levels, your shadow can defy gravity and even take over puppet bodies. Most of the puzzles have that “Aha!” moment, which can be satisfying, but there were a few that really stumped me and took a lot of time just fiddling around until something changed. Most puzzles have you manipulating objects in front of lights to make new shadows, move them, or make them grow or shrink. The real girl can’t jump, but your shadow can. This means there is light platforming in the shadow, but nothing complicated.
I did find the aspect of two characters to be a bit tedious. Some areas just have you running to the right to stop in the circle to advance to the next area. You then have to switch to the other character and run that full length again. It’s not a major problem, but it happens too frequently. I also found the rewind feature to be really handy. This prevents constant deaths and restarts. You can rewind as long as you want, so I have to applaud the developers for making this a frustrating mess. A lot of times your shadow will die or you will get caught in light, and it stops the game, but rewinding allows you to see the error you made and correct it. If you fully died every time and went back to a checkpoint, this game would be unbearably frustrating.
Overall, the visuals are great. The sketchbook look and early 20th-century aesthetics are fun, but they’re also nothing memorable. We’ve seen this kind of art style before in other games. That’s the biggest takeaway from Shady Part of Me. It does what it does fine. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t leave a lasting impression like the above mentioned games. Limbo was gruesome and had a memorable atmosphere. Little Nightmares’ ghoulish monsters stood out, and Inside’s dystopian world put you on edge. You will spend around five hours in this game and mostly forget about it the next day.
When a studio says they take inspiration from adventure games like Life is Strange, I pay attention. We follow a maid during the late 1950s, working in a hotel for a crass boss. You are basically a snoop and end up getting involved in a mystery of a love triangle, and you take it upon yourself to get co-workers involved, and the entire thing spirals out of control. Is this game a lesson on minding your own business or doing what you think is right?
You play as Ms. Roy. You start out by getting to know your co-workers, learning the game’s mechanics, and starting your amateur sleuthing. There’s not much to the game’s mechanics. You can interact with dozens upon dozens of objects, mostly letters you end up reading, and either throw them away or just inspect them. You spend your time between three floors. The fifth floor, the basement, and the lobby You eventually pick a male or female co-worker to help you dig into other people’s business, but you also have a job to do. You need to clean and tidy up each room, and all of your actions have consequences towards the end of the game. I don’t want to say what can or can’t cause these, as it can really spoil the ending, but just know that picking things up and keeping them is something the game tells you to think about the most.
Inspecting items doesn’t really matter as you’re putting them back down, but scouring all the drawers, every item, no matter how simple it seems, might give you a clue to figure out what’s happening in the love circle you want to so desperately be a part of. Sometimes you need to go to the basement and get items you don’t have, and there are a few puzzles thrown in. These aren’t difficult either. matching up pieces of paper, deciphering a code, or just finding a few clues here and there. You can hear Roy’s inner dialogue to help give you hints, and you can read everything you picked up in your inventory.
Outside of interacting with objects and solving the occasional puzzle, there isn’t anything else to do. There’s no exploring, character interactions are scripted, and there are only three characters in the entire game. This is a very short game with a runtime of about 3 hours. I do have to give credit to the developers for creating such a tense mystery at that time and actually giving the characters some depth. It’s not long enough to really give an entire backstory like other adventure games, but they cut out the nonsense and get to the meat of what they want to do and the story they want to tell. The writing is well done, and the voice acting is pretty excellent too. Your choices also really do matter, but the physical interactions with objects make you realize what you could have done differently as the final moments of the story pass.
The visuals aren’t anything impressive, but the game looks period-correct, and it’s not ugly. The lip syncing is off, but the characters look good, and they have a unique look and a lot of character in their personalities. Sadly, my biggest complaint is that I wanted to know more about these characters. The game focuses solely on this mystery, but just enough personality in the characters pokes through that this could have been a much longer game. I wanted to know more about Ms. Roy and who she is as a person. That’s what made Life is Strange so great. It focused a lot on the characters, who they are as people, and their lives. There’s a lot of potential here for something greater, but the end product of an interesting and gripping mystery is done well enough. This makes for a fun evening with choices that really matter, but that’s about it.
The Cold War was a rough time, and you really feel it in the South of the Circle. You play Peter, a British scientist struggling between love, his career, and being stranded in the Antarctic during one of the most strenuous times with Russia. Peter is a climatologist and ends up meeting a Scottish woman, Clara, who is protesting the war. He ends up torn between her companionship, his career, and the present times of him stranded at a remote research station trying to find rescue.
I don’t want to spoil the story because that’s all that South of the Circle has going for it and is the only reason to keep playing. There is almost zero gameplay outside of pressing buttons for dialogue choices. These come in the form of emotion bubbles that range from neutral, scared, sad, happy, and so on. I don’t quite know if this effects the overall story path, as my choices almost seemed to not matter. As Peter is talking to people, a bouncing red ball means a scared response. A blue ball hanging low means a sad response. A sun icon will make Peter respond joyfully, etc. These come up pretty frequently, so you’re always pressing something. Occasionally, you can move Peter around and interact with the rare object here and there, but that’s all there is to it. There are no puzzles or anything like that.
You follow this linear path of Peter trying to find people at this station while seeing flashbacks. You start in the middle, and as you move forward in the story, the flashbacks start from the beginning. It’s very entertaining, and I was interested in the story until the end thanks to the well-written dialogue and fantastic voice work. The visuals are striking in the sense that they almost look rotoscoped. There is motion capture for this minimalistic style of art, and it’s quite captivating.
The entire game is a linearly scripted adventure and lasts less than four hours. It’s a bit longer than most super-short story-driven walking simulators, and the excellent writing will keep you hooked. All of the characters have depth, and you actually have feelings for certain characters, despite some having only a short time on screen. Scenes can get intense and emotional, and you can feel the dread that Peter is facing in his struggle for survival. It’s just so well done, and it’s sad there isn’t more gameplay attached to it. It’s one of the better walking simulator stories I’ve finished in recent years.
Overall, South of the Circle provides an entertaining, well-acted, and well-written story and script, but the lack of gameplay makes you question whether this is just enough here to be an excuse for a game. The art is fantastic, and the motion capture is enticing. I wish the dialogue choices were a little more obvious about what they did or if they changed anything at all.
Walking simulators can be really great or really terrible. There is usually no in-between, but somehow Kona manages to accomplish this unremarkable achievement. You follow Carl Faulbert, a private investigator, who arrives in a remote other Canadian town to discover something is lurking around and killing its residents. The plot itself is mostly uninteresting, and details are really only explained in found notes. There is a narrator who explains things throughout, but he mostly just asks questions and never answers anything for us.
The game starts out fairly simple, and it’s an illusion of how the rest of the game is. You walk around in first-person view, interact with objects, and drive your truck. You can pull out your map in the truck to figure out where to go. You have an inventory system and can pick up objects to store, such as duck tape, hardware, flares, matches, etc., but most of these items are useless, and you don’t ever use half of the consumables. The game isn’t open-world, but there is a giant area to explore. You can wander off the beaten path or main road to find campfires to light, objects to pick up, documents to read, and various other things, but this is purely for achievements only. Wandering around the town is a chore due to the slow walking speed and short sprint speed. You have heat, sanity, and health; however, the heat meter helps drag the game down further. Yes, this is a remote area in the cold, but needing to find a specific object to obtain a jacket from a person you may never find without a walkthrough is pretty annoying. Once you get the jacket, your heat meter never becomes an issue. There are wolves spread out in the wilderness off the main road, and these can harm you. Hit them with a hammer or hatchet, or shoot them with a gun, and they’re gone. There’s an option to throw steaks at them if you want to hunt for achievements too.
The game always feels clunky in some way. Having to constantly pull out your map to check your surroundings gets tiresome, and never knowing exactly where to go will make people quit early on as well. You just wander into each house marked on the map and hopefully figure out how to make your way north until you reach the end of the game, which isn’t satisfying and doesn’t make me excited for a sequel. You can only save at campfires, and if you don’t have matches, a firestarter, or a log, you can’t save. Your inventory space is limited, so you must drag your items around in the back of your truck, and then if you need something, it’s a hike back.
You have a camera and can take photos, but again, this is mostly for achievements. Achievement hunters would love this game, but outside of that, the gameplay is mostly repetitive or pointless. The visuals are great and hold up well even today, but you are mostly seeing just white and log cabins. There isn’t anything artistic or unique about this game, which makes it a very boring game to look at. The narrator does a good job, but what’s the point if he doesn’t help progress the story? I only kept pushing forward to see if the story got more interesting or had a really awesome ending that made all of the mind-numbing walking worthwhile.
Overall, Kona has its place for a certain crowd. I love walking simulators, but many often waste my time with forgettable stories, boring settings, or mind-numbing gameplay. Kona has more gameplay than any other walking simulator has a right to, but if you cut all of it out and only let the player drive down the main road, that effort put into all the extra exploration stuff could have been put into a better story. As it stands, Kona doesn’t do any one thing particularly well.
Gylt, a Stadia (RIP) exclusive upon release, is a stealth game in a similar vein to Alan Wake. You play as a little girl trying to save her cousin Emily from monsters in a strange town, and you don’t know where you are on top of all this. You slowly get introduced to new gameplay mechanics and fight a couple of bosses.
Gylt’s short length means there’s pretty much no story or character to capture your interest or care about. In the four hours it takes to complete the game, there is zero world-building. There’s even a creepy old guy that we never find out what his purpose is or why he’s even present. We don’t know anything about the main character or Emily. It’s like starting 1/4th through a book and ending at the halfway point. I felt like there was a lot missing. There is no context, exposition, or anything like that. You can go around collecting journals, birds, and whatnot, but what’s the point? I won’t collect things in a game if I don’t feel connected to the world in some way. There’s no motivation to push me to want to find out the small details. Gylt has pretty much none of that.
When it comes to gameplay, Gylt is a run-of-the mill stealth action game. The puzzles are elementary, giving no challenge to the players at all. You have two tools at your disposal. A flashlight and a fire extinguisher. The flashpoint can not just light your way, but a focused beam can remove objects, bust pustules on enemies to kill them, and the extinguisher can freeze enemies, freeze water, and put out fires. This is all fine and dandy, but there’s nothing challenging to go along with these tools. You will be plopped into a room with a single moveable ladder. It’s obvious from one glance around the room that it goes against the wall with the vent. However, you must destroy three eyes with your light to unstick the ladder. It’s pointless filler gameplay. Even the light-switching puzzles are dull and simple.
Unlike Alan Wake, the focused flashlight to kill enemies just doesn’t feel as fluid, and I understand combat isn’t the main focus of Gylt. You are supposed to use it as a last resort—if you get caught at all. Most of the enemy patrols are easy to bypass as there are a ton of objects to hide around, and the game pretty much points a finger at your most direct path. There is a central hub with buildings that connect, and these are your main levels. Each level usually requires some sort of master key to get to its boss, and this is the only time the game was challenging or changed the pace. There are two bosses, and one focuses on combat and the other on stealth. I wanted more of this, but as the game dragged on, it never got more challenging.
The voice acting is good, the cut scenes are hand drawn, and overall, the visuals are nice. Pick any 3D animation studio in the last 20 years, and that’s how your game looks. It’s dark and moody, but never scary. A few monster designs are a little interesting and different, but nothing crazy. Also, don’t expect the game to push your systems to their limits. This game may look nice artistically, but technically it’s nothing special, and that’s also okay.
Overall, by the end of the game, I had no reason to care for anything I came across. The characters aren’t fleshed out, there’s no back story to any single thing in the game, and I’m left just moving on from this game and will most likely forget about it in an hour. I love indie games that are short and sweet, but many are forgettable with passable gameplay and mostly decent visuals. This is becoming a trend lately, and it’s kind of scary. I can’t really recommend Gylt unless you want a short, spooky evening, but don’t expect anything but average gameplay.
Resident Evil: Village is one of the best games in the series. It delivered dark horror that continued from VII, great level design, awesome characters, and an overall fun experience. Shadows of Rose ends up feeling like a super mini-RE game and runs for about three hours. You play as Ethan’s daughter Rose this time around, learn more about her kidnapping, and revisit a couple of areas as her, with new powers to boot.
The game plays exactly like Village did when you were Ethan. The only difference is that Rose is slower and not as strong as Ethan. You also only get two weapons in the DLC. A pistol and a shotgun. As a trade-off, you can use your anti-mold powers to interact with the environment and counter enemy attacks. You get to upgrade this over time through the story and can eventually slow down enemies with it and repel some. You end up revisiting Dimitrescu Castle and the home of the creepy doll, as well as a small section of the village. It’s nice to go back to these areas, but they are completely different with Rose present. There are also a couple of boss fights thrown in for good measure. The first third of the DLC is all action and shooting-oriented. You can still craft health and ammo, and you only find two upgrade parts for your pistol (none for the shotgun). The second third of the game is focused on stealth and puzzle-solving. The final third of the game is more cinematic-oriented and rather short.
I felt Capcom did a good job reusing these areas and constantly mixing up the gameplay. The stealth sections felt tense, the puzzle solving was simple enough to not need a walkthrough or guide, and the boss fights were pretty fun and interesting. It felt like Village all right, and the only question is whether or not the ending to Rose’s story is worthwhile. It’s included in the Winter’s Expansion, which includes a third-person mode and Mercenary missions, so I would say so. However, there is no reason to go back and visit this DLC, unlike the main game. The powers aren’t interesting enough to come back to either. They are mostly used to clear obstacles and stun enemies, and that’s about it.
Rose herself isn’t a very interesting character. I feel I don’t have any reason to care about her, and she wasn’t talked about enough in the main game. I feel she could have potential, but would need her own main game to pull this off. There isn’t much story in the DLC to begin with, and I was left with more questions than answers. I just shrugged at the end and didn’t give it a second thought. Most people come for the action and gameplay and not for the story.
When it comes to walking simulators, some get more praise than others, and some are just forgotten. Ethan Carterwas talked about quite a bit upon its first release, even receiving a BAFTA award for best game innovation. After playing this game, I can’t understand that kind of high praise for game innovation, but it sure does look pretty, and I have to give the ending some credit. It’s one game that builds up to a great conclusion where everything comes together. However, during the actual journey, the narrative is pretty messy and vague.
You play a detective trying to find a boy, Ethan Carter, and along the way, you solve murder scenes. The game is built to be sort of open-ended. You can easily miss side content (in the form of puzzles) if you don’t wander off and check out the house off the beaten path. Your main goal to advance the story is to find every clue for the scene, then go to the main part of the scene (usually an object), hold down the mouse button, and go into detective mode to piece everything together. Blue whisps fly out and show scene segments. You need to put them in the correct order and play it out to find out what happened. Once you do this, you get a piece of Ethan’s story and can move on.
There are a couple of areas with optional puzzles. You need to navigate an area to find the clues, which are usually identical to the area with the puzzle in it. These are either audio or visual clues; they can be quite challenging and make you think a bit. Notably, there aren’t any collectibles in the game, so you don’t have to worry about missing much. There are a couple of objects to find for achievements, but that’s about it. I wish there was some sort of reward for taking off into random, remote corners of the game. The path seems to be far more linear than it lets on. It’s really more of an illusion of how far you can walk.
The locales vary quite a bit, and the game is really pretty. When the game was initially released, it was a great piece of tech for PC gamers pushing Unreal Engine 3, and now it has been ported to Unreal Engine 4. While it looks sort of dated today with some less-than-stellar lighting effects and a lot of 2D leaves and branches on trees, there is still a lot of detail. Huge open vistas look into the forests, lakes, rivers, and dams of the Wisconsin wilderness. It looks good in these wide-open areas, but the interior parts look pretty average, and there’s nothing to write home about in terms of art direction or style. It’s hyper-realistic-looking, with very minor touches of horror sprinkled throughout.
While looking at the landscape is nice, you can easily get lost as the game prides itself on not holding your hand; however, being completely clueless also isn’t fun. Without a guide, many will turn the game off before even knowing you must solve these murder scenes during the first ten minutes. You can walk for quite a ways before realizing nothing is happening or hitting a dead end. This requires a lot of backtracking and aimless trekking through nothing but silence. While there is technically a “path” you can follow, it’s very loose and not so obvious all the time.
My favorite atmospheric segments were when the detective narrates and you’re just traveling through the vistas and valleys, taking in the scenery. It’s a bit foreboding in spots but never creeps into horror game territory. There are no jump scares, no ghouls, and nothing supernatural. A building might be dark and dilapidated, and you might enter an old mine, but there’s no creepy music or anything. It’s foreboding. That’s the best word I can come up with. I constantly found myself confused and disoriented trying to figure out what was going on in the story most of the time, so I always looked forward to that break in solving crime scenes with the walking and narration.
Overall, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a game I have put off for nearly a decade, mainly because I knew it would be a confusing mess and the story would disappoint, but I do have to say waiting for this Unreal Engine 4 port was worth it. If you like walking simulators, this is among the best visually and is a nice change of pace from the horror ones we seem to get mostly. Even if the open-ended nature of the game frustrates you, stick with a guide or keep trying, as the ending is well worth it and those open vistas are incredibly gorgeous to look at.
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Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !