Tuesday 19 April 2022

The Insurmountable Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Two games that left me scratching my head.

Insurmountable

This game is meant to be about climbing a mountain... by clicking tiles? But the truly Insurmountable bit is the camera which is always forward facing. Guess what happens when you go into one of the many dead ends? You quit that's what. Surely you can pivot the camera right? Yep, but you can't click on any tiles while doing so and when you let go it puts you back to the forward facing view. Stupid design and honestly, it's not giving me a lot of inspiration to try fix it anyway.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
 
"This game will not hold your hand," is touted right at the start of this walking simulator that happens to have puzzles scattered around the place... and I use the word "puzzles" lightly. For example, apparently walking into all the traps you can find counts as a puzzle. Eh? The gorgeous area is pretty vast which is great if you just want to stroll, but this makes finding said puzzles and story beats a chore - worse when you try to complete puzzles and have to "find the spot" which might be a tiny rock. Might be working as designed, but to me it just feels like a waste of time.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like Ethan Carter's devs took lessons from the Tomb of Horrors.

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    1. Haha, at least in this game you can keep playing instead of... no longer existing. :P

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