You have to make up your own mind up with what to do and how to go about doing it. Sure, there are prompts that pop up, helping you to discover plot points to begin your adventure, but there is a little bit more to it than that. There is a game in here to play, but it gives you no real advice on how to approach it. You DO have stuff to do, meaning that this isn’t just an experience after all. This is because I was initially trying to play TVOEC as I’d played Dear Esther, but that’s wrong. As it was, I didn’t learn how to tackle puzzles correctly until a way into the story. It would have helped me understand how to play the damned thing properly. In hindsight, since finishing it, I wish I’d known a little more about how to approach the puzzles.
I’d seen one trailer a few days before, but it wasn’t enough to explain to me what I was expected to do. Not knowing much at all about TVOEC when I loaded it up, I didn’t know what it was, or what to expect. I don’t want to explain the story to you at all, I think you need to be the judge of what you need to know before you start, but here’s the blurb from The Astronauts website about TVOEC: I’m a believer that the ex-People Can Fly developers responsible for the likes of Bulletstorm, have done exactly what they set out to do, and on the whole TVOEC is a well constructed and thoughtful experience.
It is not wrong and it does prickle at your spine for its duration. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (TVOEC from now on…) attempts to arouse the unease and tension in the player and hand-on-its-heart claims it is a narrative experience. The feelings may well be different for each of us, but it is the discussion of those feelings with others that makes art so powerful. It seems justified, then, to refer to both Dear Esther and Gone Home as “Art”, given that the point is to make the player “feel” something as one might, looking at a picture in a gallery. Dear Esther and Gone Home are capable of sowing powerful seeds, but you do have to be receptive to that style to get anything out of them. That goal is to take the reader on a journey, perhaps to make them think or simply to help them escape for a duration. I, for one, think that they are games in the same way graphic novels are books both books and graphics novels captivate the reader with a story and characters, presenting the adventure in different ways to achieve the same goal. Many stress that Dear Esther and Gone Home can’t really be called “games” at all, because “there’s nothing to do”. Ultimately you didn’t really do anything to reach the end, merely switch on some lights, find some secrets doors and feel frightened by the dark. While working through the story you just felt at constant unease. The much lauded and award winning Gone Home did much the same thing, bringing with it a really broody and tense atmosphere. From there, place you into an environment where you can look around, then find the points of interest so you can trigger the next verse of the poem. But that wasn’t the point.Ī poem, a narrator, a melancholy and sometimes haunting soundtrack, coupled with realistic but occasionally surreal-looking visuals and you, the player. Dear Esther appeared to start the ball rolling for games that evoke emotion and deep thought in the player, without the player really doing anything. A surprisingly brilliant thing happened a few years ago called Dear Esther.
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