I finished the Vanishing of Ethan Carter tonight. Very good game, if you haven't played it it's definitely worth a buy. Its short but the story makes up for it. The graphics were gorgeous, if the town hadn't been abandoned, creepy and a little depressing I would've wanted to visit! But the best thing by far was the story. If you haven't played it yet you might want to stop reading here, cause there will be spoilers. It's a pretty heavily influenced by a few things, to the point that it could be described as unoriginal. In fact it borrows from so many sources that its quite a list. Lovecraft, Shakespeare, Poe, the Sixth Sense, and a short story I'm sure most people have read, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. If you haven't read it you should give it a try, its short and worth the time. It was required reading at my high school, I spent an hour googling it because I couldn't remember the name! I'm sure it has other influences I didn't pick up on but those are the ones I caught. There isn't much action, other than running away from a creepy guy at one point. The focus is on the story rather than gameplay, and it does have the twist ending that's become somewhat standard. The ending can be interpreted a few different ways. Was Ethan the sleeper? Was Paul his imagination or something else? Did he die at the end or did his family save him? There's more than one way to interpret it, which is pretty standard for the genre. But Ethan Carter manages to pull it off without feeling like a carbon copy. The game is definitely multi-layered and worth a closer look. I'll know I'll be playing it again, just to see if I can get anything else out of it.
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