The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The Astronauts
The first time I stumbled upon one of the murder-mystery puzzles in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, I walked right past it. And the second time, too. And the third.
But not the fourth.
Oh, I’m not saying I didn’t give them the old college try. I mean, how do you ignore a set of leg-stumps splayed on a train track, with a thick smear of blood leading away from them to the body of the previous owner of said stumps? This was no mere window decoration, here in the eerie quiet of this secluded forest. I was supposed to do… something. But I poked around the immediate vicinity, and didn’t see anything to do.
Meanwhile, the game’s opening text crawl was still fresh in my head: “This game is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand.”
Well, I thought, if my hand’s not being held, I may as well just keep walking and see what’s going on. And I walked past a puzzle, then another, then another. This is not me. I am a deliberate player. I like to look at stuff. And I don’t like skipping puzzles. I just didn’t know what I was looking at. And Ethan Carter wanted it that way.
A game that doesn’t grab onto your hand is a refreshing experience these days. But this one could have benefited from a little bit of secret hand-holding.
Released in October 2014, Vanishing of Ethan Carter does call itself a “narrative experience,” but it’s no Gone Home or Dear Esther —that is, it’s not just about wandering around, reading things and absorbing a story with no elements of challenge. It is about those things, but with puzzles.
Now, actually, Ethan Carter would probably have been great with no puzzles, as the environment—a sleepy little hamlet in the mountains—is shockingly gorgeous, and laid out in such a way as to let you almost meditate on its beautiful vistas as you walk through it. The puzzles add just enough challenge to pull you in even more.
What ended up happening to me is that, after solving a few other minor puzzles, I happened into another murder scene. That’s when, after a few false starts—did I need to go find a bulb and reassemble this oil lamp so I could illuminate the crypt (no I did not)?—I accidentally happened upon the esoteric game mechanic that allows you to solve the murders.
The Astronauts
Ethan Carter buries this mechanic, and it’s difficult to discover because you don’t know what to look for. If you’re playing a shooter, you look for the button that shoots. If you’re playing a first-person paranormal mystery investigation narrative, you, uh…
Maybe it was something I’d have happened upon through experimentation. But the way it all went down was a total fluke. Once I realized what I had to do, it was time to race back to the previous murder scene (well, walk slowly back) and solve that too.
I still didn’t solve the game’s very first puzzle until the end of the game, when it gave me a, let’s be frank, rather hand-holdy message that was tantamount to HEY DUMMY, THAT WAS A PUZZLE.
Ethan Carter’s developer properly understands this as a plus. It’s nice to have a game that doesn’t hold your hand, because these days games are if anything over-tutorialized. Developers don’t want to spend $100 million and three years making a game and have you not know how to play it.
And quite frankly, as a player this can be disastrous as well—we all have stories of playing through an entire game without even knowing about a crucial time- and energy-saving maneuver because the game never told us about it. So we make this pact that we’re going to spend the early part of the game being told that the A button is for jumping, then practicing it until the game tells us we got it right.
Contemporary games’ tendency toward overtutorialization was famously parodied a few years ago by a game designer who imagined what the classic Super Mario Bros. would be like if it were introduced today:
Zack Hiwiller/hiwiller.com
Yeah, weren’t games better when they didn’t hold your hand? But Ethan Carter’s opening line reinforces a false choice, between a game that holds your hand and a game that abandons you to your own devices. It’s not hand-holding that players mind. It’s feeling like your hand is being held that’s the problem.
Luckily, we are dumb and can be tricked.
Here’s the actual opening scene of Super Mario Bros., what you see as soon as you start walking. This impossible pyramid of gravity-free bricks is one of the most iconic tableaux in all of gaming, and it’s actually a little tutorial that you’d never notice.
Nintendo/Screengrab: WIRED
There’s an enemy on the ground, and you have to jump over it. (If you don’t figure that out, you ‘ll die and start right here again until you do.) During all this aimless, frantic, novice-level jumping, you’ll probably hit a brick, and thereby learn that when you hit bricks, stuff comes out. One of them pops out a Mushroom, which immediately travels away from you. But then, it ricochets perfectly off the pipe placed in the perfect position to do so, and it heads back towards you. With the bricks over your head limiting the range of your jump, it would be harder not to collide with the mushroom—which turns Mario into giant-size Super Mario.
Now, via this painstakingly, expertly designed mechanism, you’ve learned how to play Super Mario Bros., and you didn’t perceive your hand being held at all.
Yes, I realize it’s very easy and not a little naïve to say “This game should be more like Super Mario Bros.” But Ethan Carter could have been helped by some little trick like that, some very brief trap for the player that guides them to solving an early puzzle so they don’t have to happen into it, but that makes them think they did it all on their own.
Putting the “this game doesn’t hold your hand” line in written text at the game’s beginning is a nice touch. It actually is a direction to the player, if a minimally intrusive one. Had that not been there, I wouldn’t have reacted nearly as well to finding that first dead body and not really being able to make anything happen within the game while I was standing there.
“This game doesn’t hold your hand” was a permission slip for me: If I didn’t know what to do, that didn’t mean that I was failing or that I was missing things—I should just keep walking. Go on, cross that bridge, try going over there, don’t worry that you’re forgetting something. And since the game is so beautiful that I wanted to see more and more of it, always needed to see what was over the next hill or around that corner, it was nice to feel free to do that.
But eventually, you do need to start figuring out what to do. And if you want players to discover things more quickly, remember there’s no difference between discovering them entirely on your own and being tricked into thinking you did.
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