The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter and Rogue Legacy feel like two aging indie games that are at risk of being forgotten, despite them being well-liked in their own time. Well, here's a chance to revisit or revive that interest: both games are free to keep if you grab them from the Epic Games Store between now and April 14th.
]]>A peaceful free-roaming mode mmmight be coming to pretty walk-o-puzzler The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, or might not. Developers The Astronauts today announced they're adding Free Roam mode to the game as they bring it to the Xbox One, see, but they won't necessarily bring it over to PC too. The feature "needs" to be exclusive to Xbone for a while, for starters, then there would be "some serious work" involved in porting it over. For now, they're saying they "probably" will bring Free Roam mode to Ethan Carter PC - as long as there's sufficient demand. Hello there, I am interested in such a mode.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
Watching walking simulators evolve from the waffling emptiness of Dear Esther into remarkable narrative adventures like Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch has been one of my favourite spectator sports as a games journalist. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is one of the better stepping stones on this long and winding road. It has players assume the role of psychic detective Paul Prospero, who arrives in the gorgeous Red Creek Valley on the trail of a missing boy.
]]>John was jolly pleased with The Vanishing of Ethan Carter [official site], enjoying its pretty puzzle-solving but damning its backtracking and lack of saves. Well, many wonky bits are now better and some already-nice parts too, as developers The Astronauts have released a big free remaster update.
The Vanishing of Ethan Redux is technically a separate game, not an update, bumped up from Unreal Engine 3 and remade in Unreal Engine 4. The new version brings a new save system, faster loading of the world, visual tweaks, and more. It's out now free for everyone who owns the game on Steam and GOG.
]]>Polish studio People Can Fly made well-received OTT shooters Painkiller and Bulletstorm, then they got bought by Epic and became Epic Games Poland, and now suddenly they're independent and are People Can Fly again. I'm genuinely distressed that they didn't take the opportunity to name themselves People Can Fly Again. No cast-iron reason has been given for the regained independence and there is, as yet, no sign of conflict, but the official line is that it's "to reflect the team’s desire to create their own games." PCF confirm to us that they retain the rights to Bulletstorm, but sadly there's no talk of a sequel as yet.
]]>Last night, BAFTA gathered in London to dish out sinister metal masks to a chosen few gamesfolk who had been found worthy of such an honour. I tend to be dismissive of Awards Shows, unless something that I really like wins a tiny trophy - then I'm quite happy and momentarily convinced that the world is just and right. It happened with Cave Johnson at this year's Academy Awards (I'm ambivalent about Birdman) and at the 2015 BAFTA Game Awards it happened with...Destiny as best game? Oh no. Full results below.
]]>I have The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter installed on my PC and ready to go. But there's something that's been playing on my mind regarding that game before I've even booted it up. It's been nagging at me ever since I watched a video from Andy Kelly's Other Places series – the one which focuses on Ethan Carter's Red Creek Valley – and it finally crystallised a problem I've been experiencing for years without being able to put it into words.
Just after a shot of a dam there's a lingering shot of a churchyard. In the foreground a handless statue of Jesus marks the grave of a woman named Thusnelda. In the background the autumn trees sway in the breeze and the weed-infested grass – well, I want to say that it sways but it's a sway which comes via a clump-by-clump waggle. That grass is why I'm proposing there exists a foliage version of the uncanny valley.
]]>Most survival games are set in the great outdoors, and while The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Firewatch aren't survival games, both have taken interesting steps to present natural wilderness. We asked Mitch Bowman to find out more.
The outward appearance of everything on Earth that wasn’t made by humans is one big accident. It’s the result of a bewilderingly complicated system of interactions between organisms that couldn’t care less how pretty their surroundings are, and the end result isa chaotic mess.
As you might imagine, that makes it pretty tough for environment artists to recreate the corners of the planet that humans haven’t messed with. We understand cities - we know what they’re for, we know why they were designed the way they were, and we probably even have some idea how they were built. Not so with the great outdoors, and that presents an interesting challenge to those attempting to emulate wildernesses in video games.
]]>The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter, the first game from The Astronauts, offers a strikingly beautiful haunting journey exploring the mystery of the disappearance of a young boy. From the developers who brought us Bulletstorm (when they were People Can Fly), it couldn't be a more different game. Here's wot I think:
]]>Private investigator seems a noble, or perhaps unambitious, career for a magic man. Possessing supernatural powers of precognition, Paul Prospero (he even has a great magician name!) decided to become a detective rather than e.g. a Strike It Lucky winner. No, instead he's out poking around forests looking for a missing child in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
13 minutes of first-person mystery-solving gameplay are on this here Internet for your eyes to see in a new trailer from developers The Astronauts. The former Bulletstorm folks have also announced they'll launch the game on September 25.
]]>The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter is a weird horror game from The Astronauts, a team comprised of Bulletstorm veterans. Until now, very little of the game has been revealed and the latest trailer only moves the veil a couple of inches. We know that Ethan Carter is a boy and that he has vanished. We know that the player character is the preposterously named Paul Prospero, an occult detective, and we know that the story takes place in Red Creek Valley. The location, as you may remember, has been created using clever-clogs scanning techniques. We've seen gifs but the new video shows the scenery in action. Being scenery, it's not doing anything particularly dynamic, it's just sort of being there and looking pretty.
]]>No matter how spooky a spooky game's rocks may be, it's always comforting to know they can't really hurt you. Unless, that is, they're actually real rocks scanned into the game with fancy technology, and the original is still lurking out there somewhere in the mist, waiting to trip you. That's the true terror of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, the non-combative horror walk 'em up from Bulletstorm veterans The Astronauts. The gang are showing off their mastery of the arcane science of photogrammetry, or smooshing loads of photos together to make a 3D model.
The big idea is that with a game world built of scanned real objects rather than the same handful of repeating and tiling hand-made art, they say, players will "stop seeing assets and start seeing the world." Which is presumably helpful when trying to scare the kecks off visitors to it.
]]>The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter is what the main folk behind Bullestorm did next, and the combination of spooky forests and some bloke's name makes it impossible not to claim it sounds like Alan Wake. However, it sounds like it's branching off down the Dear Esther/Gone Home path rather than the shootybang one, which for my money often results in more atmosphere than a storm of bullets does. See also Silent Hill's walking/worrying sections vs Silent Hill's monster-clobbering sections. This is first-person, I should mention.
Very little is known about Ethan Carter really, but they are very proud of their graphics engine and its use of 'photogrammetric' technology. As far as I can tell that means turning 2D images of real-world scenes into 3D game scenes. Kind of like the faces in the first Max Payne, only with hills and stuff? Anyway, they're using GIFs to demonstrate it. Look at our website daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaance.
]]>It would be fair to say that - before today - we knew almost nothing about former Bulletstorm lead Adrian Chmielarz and co's "weird horror" departure into the land of indie-dom The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Now, of course we're in the dark on Ethan himself. He's vanished! Like a magician or your phone when you've removed it from your pocket and freak out because you have no idea where you left it and it's in your other hand. The whole point of the game is to figure out what happened to him. But it'd be nice to know, well, how we're going to scare up some clues from the game's cast of "haunting and macabre" characters. That aaaaand mooooore [chains rattling, bats, spooky ghost sounds] below.
]]>I think about 50% of the gaming development community is either ex-Looking Glass or ex-People Can Fly. This lot, The Astronauts, are the latter, and these Polish Bulletstorm vets have just announced The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter.
]]>![קודי רכבת סטאר של Honkai [דצמבר 2024]](https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/honkai-star-rail-bronya-fu-xuan.jpg?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "קודי רכבת סטאר של Honkai [דצמבר 2024]")
