There are several long stretches of trail, perfectly enjoyable to walk along and scenery-gaze, but with absolutely nothing going else on. The beautiful world is also extremely large, and while this isn't a complaint, I do have to note that it's not exactly stuffed with activities. There's a lot of sprinting around in the dark, often in confusion, through winding, generically spooky, near-identical tunnels, where the initial heightened dread and fear quickly gave way to a "let's get this over with" mentality (though the puzzle at the end is fun).
The beauty of the outside world makes it a major bummer to have to leave it during an overlong jaunt in a series of old mining tunnels, which is the game's weakest section. Sometimes you just have to stop and take it all in. I've seen these types of puzzles in games before, but even so, they're very well-made and satisfying to solve here. One requires a fair bit of memorization, something I'm rotten at (I had to resort to taking screenshots and referring to them for comparison), another involves matching symbols and shapes to unlock a gate, and, naturally, there's a big water valve to turn (video games). There are a couple of other types of puzzles as well. Still, even when it's easy, it's good fun. There a handful of such ghostly replays to manage, and the others are a bit more straightforward, the final one being so obvious it seems silly to even ask the player to number it. I found it positively thrilling the first time I completed one correctly, though unfortunately, it peaked with that first sequence.
It's an enjoyable activity, sort of like directing a movie without having seen the script. If you don't, the scene will play until it reaches your mistake before dissipating, leaving you to make corrections and run the spook-reel again. Once you've assigned numbers to the ghosts, you can watch the entire scene unfold from start to finish in a spectral replay, provided you've ordered the scene correctly. well, I might have sussed that out myself. On the other hand, upon finding a bloodied corpse lying next to a fire axe, the words "Inspect" hovering over both.
No, I probably wouldn't have noticed a discolored patch of grass indicating that an object, long dormant there, had recently been moved. Real life isn't as pretty as Ethan Carter, plus, I got tired and a little hungry.Īt times the floating words, sometimes instructions, sometimes Paul's own internal musings, are absolutely necessary. I walked around a couple times, in real life. Also, you can take your shoes off if you want. "When will DayZ standalone get vehicles?" is the common wail of DayZ players, because they're tired of walking everywhere and there simply aren't any other games to fly helicopters in. Simulation-wise, practicing walking around a house seems much more likely to come in handy because we're in houses a lot. Ethan Carter has players walking around outside. Gone Home has players walking around a house.
As a game involving lots of careful exploration and zero rocket launchers, Ethan Carter will no doubt be described by some incredibly clever people as a "walking simulator." But how well does it really simulate walking when compared to other notable walking simulators?