Yesterday, Adrian Chmielarz, the creative lead of Bulletstorm, announced his new PC game, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a “weird fiction horror” title. Today, he detailed the mysterious game in an exchange with Eurogamer.
The most notable points are that The Vanishing of Ethan Carter will be played in first-person and will not contain any combat – a major departure from Chmielarz’s work on Bulletstorm and Painkiller.
“It’s not about shooting monsters,” Chmielarz explained. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. After all, I did design Painkiller and Bulletstorm, and I enjoy grinding meat with bullets as much as the next guy. But I wanted to make a different kind of game for a long time, and now it can finally happen.”
When asked about the gameplay mechanics, Chmielarz said, “The focus of the game is on its escapist factor: the immersion, the exploration, and the discovery. But it wouldn’t make much sense to play as a detective if you weren’t doing any detecting, would it? So there’s a little bit of that, but again, the focus is not on mind-bending puzzles, but on unsettling discoveries.
“Imagine Dear Esther with gameplay, murder, and corpses. That’s what The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is closest to.”
Regarding the first-person perspective, Chmielarz told me, “A few amazing games like The Walking Dead or Journey have already shown that third-person can work perfectly fine for emotions, but I think that when it comes to immersion, first-person is hard to beat. This may just be me, but I feel a better sense of presence in the virtual world when it’s in first-person. And that sense of presence is exactly what we’re after. We want players to feel like they’re really there, shiver when it’s cold, and lower their heads when it’s windy.”
He also noted that he would like to support Oculus and other 3D devices and displays – something that’s well-suited for first-person games.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is due out this year on PC.
