games like the vanishing of ethan carter

Thankfully, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter concerns itself with more than just sightseeing. Around every corner, you'll find yet another reason to pick your jaw up off the floor thanks to the unrelenting beauty of Red Creek Valley's winding forest pathways, distressed, turn-of-the-20th-century architecture, breathtaking vistas, and all the other visual elements that lend this wholly fictional location a distinct sense of history and presence. Though its setting doesn't strive for the outlandish, and its puzzles feel more natural to the world around them, Vanishing's Red Creek Valley provides a convincingly lived-in and unbelievably detailed backdrop that feels ripped from faded pictures and jittery home movies, rather than the work of 3D modeling software. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter picks up where Myst and its various sequels left off-spiritually, that is. And, thanks to those newfangled CD-ROM drives, Myst could sell its various environments more convincingly than any game had done before-there's a reason its logo features a silhouette of the player being tossed onto the game's titular island.ĭid I mention how good this game looks? Because holy crap.

Of course, the Miller brothers' breakout hit places more of an emphasis on explicit puzzles than the games it would later inspire, but their creation sold itself primarily on the promise of immersion: Myst wasn't just a game, it was a place. Atmospheric, first-person games largely focused on environmental storytelling-known by the tongue-in-cheek term 'walking simulator'-have risen to prominence on PC lately, which marks a Renaissance for a type of experience that first sprung to life with 1993's Myst.

Games like the vanishing of ethan carter