https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuu1OntyQ54
The video contains the section I’m talking about. Ignore the commentary.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an environmental narrative experience centering around the player character’s search for the boy who summoned him to the town the game is set in. With intense and mesmerizing graphic detail, the game world uses sound and context to lead the player from narrative event to narrative event in a patchwork collage of nonlinear, non-apparent character development. The game begins with the words: “This game is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand.” This fourth wall breaking introduction is an atmospheric undercut, but forgivable since it precedes all other events in the game. However, this sentence is an accurate description of the game’s difficulty and how it uses difficulty as a medium to tell subtle elements of the story. For example, there is no conventional death in the game, just simply noticing and failure to. Sections of the game function on separate mechanics, and figuring out these loosely defined puzzles also provides a layer of agency. In these sections the player “solves anomalies.” These anomalies are faintly noticeable traces of the extraordinary, events you may fail to notice as you progress, and provide a significant chunk of the game’s more nuanced character development. The series of actions to progress in these areas are all different, yet they share the same feel with only one exception. The scene called The Curse of the Sea-Thing destroys all of the subtlety and meticulous layering of environment and narrative with the most seductive of mechanics: the jump scare. Of all the anomaly solving scenes in the game, this one is by far the most cheap and the most scary. The player approaches the location of the scene by descending a long, barely lit tunnel in the earth, spiraling down for several minutes. At the end of the tunnel the player is confronted with a written warning: Turn back, the ritual failed. Candles freckle the tunnel before the player and water pools at his feet. The music changes into something yet to be heard. In sync these elements form a cohesive, anxious precipice; all done with atmospheric and environmental cues. Yet, if the player marches forward, ignoring the warning, his character is met with a single rasping wail and a slenderman archetype at his soggy heels. At first play through, the player may continue ahead at a self controlled pace, and is caught off guard by this figure who rudely disrupts the ambiance of the world. On subsequent playthroughs this figure becomes an active excuse to ignore all environmental elements and tear through the tunnels with abandon. This is a major break in the flow of play and is not effective in a game that is, on all other accounts, an environmental narrative. For a game that claims to not hold your hand, this section relies heavily on pre-existing, easy-to-scare horror tropes that here fall flat. From a design perspective, this break in flow, which is never repeated, is an annoying blister, since it is required to finish the game. From an artistic perspective, this section is a fault in the metaphors of death (from the perspective of the dying) that this game addresses. Yes, this portion forces the player to feel fear, and death can involve a great amount of fear. Yet that fear is short lived, anticipated, and entertaining (that’s why that trope/mechanic has been so commercially successful.) Death, especially the sort of deaths that the game talks about, is not short-lived. It is permanent. And certainly dying is not entertaining. Terminal events are not fondly reminisced about by the deceased.
