Adventure Gamers - Forums

Today’s screenshot is from my absolutely favourite puzzle in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

The object is quite simple, you are in a house and you have to walk through the different rooms until you find something - Sounds simple enough, right?

Well, there is a catch!

The doorways are not simply doorways, but instead some sort of portals that can lead to any other room in the house, and just simply walking through them will cause you to walk in circles and quickly get completely disorientated.
By clicking on the portal, you can however swap the portal so it leads to another room, so the objective here is that you have to arrange all of the portals/rooms, so that the doorways lead to the correct room, that is the one that is physical suppose to be at the other side of the doorway. Or in other words, until it acts just like a normal house with normal doorways.

You can solve this puzzle purely by trial & error, perhaps combined with some common sense of how rooms in a house are normally arranged, but doing so would take thousands of tries, so there are of course also some clues to help you. I won’t reveal what they are, just that you have to make the connection between the clues and this puzzle yourself, and it either requires a very good visual memory or some detailed note taking.

Another thing I like about this puzzle, is that it apart from being able to swap the rooms, then it is never explained to you how the puzzle actually works or what the objective is. In fact you can just stumble into the house, walk around a bit and then get that wtf is going on here moment, and end up leaving the house completely clueless. Then later you might get an eureka moment when you suddenly realise how you were suppose to solve this puzzle.

In fact wtf moments and leaving the player completely clueless, is probably what this games does best.

Oscar - 12 November 2015 02:35 AM

Hated the puzzle, because I have a poor visual memory and the areas of the house were too similar.

Well that is why pen and paper was invented

Oscar - 12 November 2015 02:35 AM

Didn’t like the game overall, because it was mostly empty space. A shame because it could have been good in Myst-fashion slideshow mode. I don’t know why games feel the need to include vast areas of nothingness when they are still basically traditional adventure games.

I think it would have been absolutely horrible as a node based or slideshow game, at the very least they would have to reduce the size by a factor 100 (yes there is a lot of empty space), otherwise it would be impossible to navigate. And doing so would mean that it lost absolutely everything that made it special - but I guess if you hated the game that would be a positive thing