The first-person supernatural mystery The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is good stuff. We called it a "intriguing, mostly satisfying, and most importantly, wonderfully restrained" story in our 82/100 review, and the biggest complaint—lack of a manual save option—was addressed in a "Redux" update that dropped in 2015. And now it looks like another update adding a peaceful, puzzle-free "free roam" mode, could be on the way too. 

The mode is on the way, in the Xbox One version of the game that's coming out later this month. "Many people agree this is one of the most beautiful games on the market, and some expressed a desire to explore the environment without any darkness in it, and by darkness we mean bloodies [sic] corpses and locked doors. They wanted to just have a nice relaxing walk down the Red Creek Valley," The Astronauts co-founder Adrian Chmielarz explained. "That option now exists, and it’s called the Free Roam mode. Everything that was gameplay and everything that was evil is removed from the game in that mode." 

Chmielarz also posted a few images demonstrating what the game looks like in the new mode. "Turn down the music, leaving only sound effects on, and it’s like you’re really there," he wrote. 

Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that the free roam mode will be released for the PC version of the game. For one thing, it's apparently a timed exclusive feature for the Xbox One, but more importantly the job will require more effort that you might expect. Updating the PS4 version sounds like the biggest sticking point, but the PC version gets caught up in that too.   

"It’s not like the Free Roam-enhanced PS4 (plus 4K on Pro) and PC versions (well, 4K is already there) are locked behind a key, just waiting to be released one day. Some serious work needs to be put in first in order to make them happen," Chmielarz said. 

"For now, we’ll just wait and see if there’s any demand for the feature to come to PS4 and PC one day. It does seem like it, since this section of the post exists exactly because you are already asking. So we will probably do it, but the 'probably' is a key word here. We cannot guarantee the feature happening 100%, because, again, it’s not as easy as we are sure some people believe it is." 

The Astronauts announced in December that it is working on a new project called Witchfire, which looks to me like The Vanishing of Daniel Garner Killed My Dick. We can only hope.

Thanks, RPS.

Games confront us with failure all the time. It could be the famous YOU DIED message of Dark Souls, or the unfavourable scorecard at the end of a hard-fought round of Rocket League. In the heat of the moment calm Vulcan exteriors can crack. Curses are uttered. Innocent controllers are thrown out of windows. Things can get intense.

Some games induce rage more than others. A long game of Dota 2 squandered by one error will understandably leave some participants furious, but when we started writing about the games that made us quit in anger some surprises turned up. Even a serene adventure like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or a strategy game like Civ can trigger a moment of total despair. Here is a collection of our ragequit stories. Share your own in the comments.

Rocket League and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Samuel Roberts

About ten years ago I used to break games, controllers and keyboards on a regular basis after losing at something (without going into it, losing my Ifrit card in Final Fantasy VIII s Triple Triad to the game s awful random rule ended up costing me 30). Then, in the last few years I thought I d mellowed out, sailing through much of my twenties with only a vanquished 360 controller (vanquished by my foot—I don t remember why) to show for it. Turns out, this was delusional and I m still furious all of the time. Usually when I m playing online.

Rocket League came out last year. I must ve reinstalled that game about five or six times after having bad games and deleting it from my Steam library, and it s always for the same reason—losing when I feel I didn t deserve to, either because my teammate was rubbish or because I was (usually the latter). The worst time was when I turned my computer off at the wall after, probably, an own goal. I am a tit. I m staying away from competitive games from now on, going back to my precious little bubble of mowing down NPCs in a bid to see the closing credits of story-based games because I m too much of a baby to compete with other humans. Wah! In a similar vein, I also wasn t massively keen on the time we lost an amateur match of Dota to a surprise team of experienced players, and my measured response was to never play Dota again.

I tend to have more moments of indescribable disappointment than ragequitting these days. This happened to me with The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, the first-person adventure released in 2014. I was enjoying the feeling of being in that world a lot, and while I loved a few of the individual, weirder moments I encountered in that world, I didn t really like the story that much at all. I wandered into a mine, went down some stairs and a monster walked up to me and killed me without any explanation. I turned it off, uninstalled it and went to bed. It s a very mellow form of ragequitting.

Now, I ve been told there s a very easy way to get past this bit by PC Gamer s Tony Ellis, and I don t doubt it. But there was something so crushing about this seemingly random death in a game about walking through an environment and absorbing story that I just had to leave it. I didn t play games for an entire month after. I m sure it s not just Ethan Carter s fault, but I found that moment so oddly depressing that I needed a month off from the entire medium. Still, I very much enjoyed the trees and the tense atmosphere, and maybe one day I ll go back and activate the simple solution for getting past that monster. And then I ll take another month off playing games.

Nuclear Throne

Wes Fenlon

A lot of things explode in Nuclear Throne. Barrels. The grenades and rockets you fire out of very dangerous weapons. Worm things. Frog things. Cars. I ve died many times in Nuclear Throne, often due to one type of explosive or another. Usually that death comes swiftly and unexpectedly, and I sigh or go UGH and start up another round. But sometimes that death is annoying enough to make me mash the ESC key until I m back on my desktop to cool off. And man, nothing in Nuclear Throne has managed to piss me off more than a stupid exploding car.

The cars are just environmental hazards to avoid or use to your advantage. Shoot em and they can take out a good chunk of enemies. Stand near them when bullets are incoming, and you might be blown up yourself. Got it? Easy to understand. I never took damage from an exploding car. Until. UNTIL. Until I cleared out a level and the portal to the next level appeared near me with a boom, as it always does. Near me also happened to be near a car. And when a portal appears near a car with a boom, that car explodes. And when you re near a car and it explodes, even as you re being dragged helplessly into the portal that whisks you away to the next level, you take damage. And, in my case, die. And, also in my case, mash the ESC key so hard it will forever fear the touch of an index finger.

Fuck you, portal. Fuck you, car.

I relaunched Nuclear Throne three minutes later.

Tomb Raider

Angus Morrison

I ragequit a series. One of my favourite series, in fact, but despite knowing that I burn with the self-righteous anger of a fanboy, I won t go back to Tomb Raider. Each time I post about an impending Rise of the Tomb Raider release I secretly wish that Microsoft s exclusivity deal had been that little bit more exclusive. I retreat to a dark corner so as to escape the vile glow of other people s excitement.

I tolerated the new Tomb Raider, for a time. The blocky climbing frame formula of the previous games was ancient after all, and the series was due for a refresh, but Crystal Dynamics refreshed it so hard it became something else, namely an over-earnest story about a psychotic, angst-ridden gap year.

The open, choose-your-own-route environments had a dash of brilliance about them, but on every clifftop was a platoon to be mown down while teen Lara warbled about Bastards! in a comically bad British accent. And the actress is British! I got so sick of shooting things and failing QTEs that I left the main story in search of what I was led to believe would be a tomb to raid: The Tomb of the Lost Adventurer. It was in the name. What I got was a lone physics puzzle, but as I was willing to try anything to relive Lara s glory days at that point, I gave it a crack anyway.

The lone physics puzzle bugged. The body of a crashed plane I had to topple to make a bridge just hung in the air devoid of support. The sole remnant of Tomb Raider s heritage as a puzzler was inexplicably borked. I m done.

Super Hexagon

James Davenport

Sometimes I wonder what it would take for a video game to kill a person. During my senior year of college, I found Super Hexagon. I dabbled with the mobile version between classes, but didn t get serious until I could sit across from 50 inches of warping, pulsing, spiraling shapes on an obscene TV via my PC. Games rarely hold my attention for more than their running length or the first few times I hit a difficulty wall. There are just too many other interesting games to try out, and I get anxious about missing something special.

Super Hexagon consumed me. I spent hours and hours trying to beat my friends high scores on every level, and eventually unlocked the final stage, Superhexagonest. At first, it seemed impossible to survive for 60 seconds, the requirement to win a given stage. During a weekend visit back home, I ignored my family for a day, working to hit that sweet 60. Hours of attempts didn t even net a close run. Sleep was difficult that night.

Immediately after waking up, I booted up the game, still not entirely conscious. It was magic. Like some kind of sleepyboy superhuman, I hit 45 seconds with ease and kept going. Suddenly aware of my nearly perfect run, I started to wake up. 55 seconds, still going. My hands start shaking. 57 seconds and the sweat rolls in. 58 and I nearly cry out. 59 and I fuck it. Without a word, I got dressed, packed up the dogs into the pickup and drove up Elk Ridge, a mountainous forested area ten miles out of town. I brought headphones and set Boards of Canada on shuffle. My dogs were excited for the impromptu walk, and started peeing on every tree and bush they could. This was something I could control, something I could win. So I peed on their pee until my place in our little hierarchy was made clear. We walked for a while, spooked a black bear, sat on a log, and then went home. I didn t touch Super Hexagon for months.

Spelunky

Chris Livingston

Not only is Spelunky the rare game that makes me ragequit, it s the only game that always makes me ragequit. I never finish on a high note: if I have a good run but die, I always play again to try to best it. If I have a terrible run, I keep playing until I have a better one, but then after that better run, as I said, I keep pushing until I have another terrible one. It doesn t help that I ve never once successfully beat the game, which means every single session has ended in disappointment or frustration. And we re talking about over a thousand sessions.

What s more frustrating is that the rage is directed at myself rather than the game, as my deaths are pretty much always caused by a mistake, a stupid risk, or an error brought on by trying to be overly cautious due to a previous mistake or stupid risk. Spelunky is harsh but generally fair: I ve learned how everything works so there are no real surprises. I love it, but stink at it, and the only way I see not ragequitting it is to beat it, which I just can t seem to do. I hate you, Spelunky. Never change.

Civilization V

Tyler Wilde

When I was a kid, a friend mercilessly pummeled me at Street Fighter 2 and then said I was a gaylord, so I threw the controller at him and power-walked out of his house. They called me sensitive back then. I don t really get too mad in competitive games anymore, though. I ve spit angry half-words at Rocket League teammates here and there, because what are they even doing, but I do it with my mic off, because I m not a jerk. I ve never left in the middle of a match, except once when my roommate started uploading a YouTube video and my ping went to hell and so I had to go throw the controller at him.

What really gets to me is Civilization V. When I ve got a sweet little empire going, and I m just about to realize my master blueprint of roads and port towns and cozy, defensible foothill settlements, some bastard like Alexander the Great rolls up to my capital with a bunch of siege engines. I ve been tinkering with trade routes and figuring a military can come later, trying to make a pretty civilization before a toothy one, and Alexander just has to pop in and kick over my sandcastle. I play this way almost every time, even though I know better. I probably Alt-F4 half the time I play Civ these days. I wonder if I wouldn t prefer to play without any other civilizations. Just me, alone, slowly covering the world with little buildings.

Dark Souls

Tom Senior

Ragequit moments are deliberately built into Dark Souls. As you push into a new location you steal souls from hollowed corpses that Alt-F4 d out of existence long ago. With each new difficulty spike Dark Souls dares you join them. It's clever, but it doesn't make me feel any better when things go wrong.

In fact, knowing this only makes me angry about my own anger. I'm playing right into their hands. When the Four Kings' homing purple missiles of hot bullshit one-shot me, a noise like a strangled moped emerges from my throat. I throttle my pad and grimace like a Sith lord on the bog. Sometimes I say "whyyyyyy" out loud. It is very undignified.

The burning fury in my soul can only be resolved by blaming things. I blame my ageing Xbox 360 controller, with its stunted insensitive shoulder bumpers. I blame FromSoft, for everything. I blame the laws of chance, for some reason, even though damage in Dark Souls is metered out through blows and counter-blows without need for dice rolls. I blame the bus-wide butt-cheeks of the Demon Firesage for blocking the camera during a deadly area-of-effect attack. Screw it all. Turn it off.

I ve had a stuttering relationship with Dark Souls, then. I was left so exhausted by the descent through Blight Town that I stopped playing for a few months. I put it down after attempting the opening section of Anor Londo, which has you running up and down buttresses under heavy arrow fire that knocks you to your death. But looking back, it was a broadly positive experience. Dark Souls infuriating moments are matched by euphoric highs. Even in the throes of agonising frustration, at least Dark Souls made me feel something. Few games put me through the emotional wringer in such a way.

Fuck the Bed of Chaos forever, though.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was certainly an adventure, but it didn't have much action. Chris Livingston described it as "a tense and spooky stroll through a gorgeous world", and stroll is the operative word here: it was a slow-paced, investigative experience. The studio responsible for it, Poland-based The Astronauts, looks set to expand its horizons though, according to a job description on its website.

The description is in Polish, but a rough Google translate suggests the studio's follow-up will be "an open world action-adventure". The Astronauts is recruiting for an AI and general programmer who can work with Unreal Engine 4. While the new title will presumably have more "action" the translation suggests it will have a similar mood and focus on narrative.

That's good news, because those elements were the best parts of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. It was also a very beautiful game too, as these 8K screenshots demonstrate. And it's not like The Astronauts don't have action pedigree: the studio has former employees of People Can Fly, responsible for underrated shooter Bulletstorm.

As a thoughtful supernatural adventure created by the founders of the studio that gave the gaming world "dicktits," The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was something of a surprise. And now, a year after its launch, it's time for another surprise: It's been completely rebuilt in Unreal Engine 4 and re-released as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux.

The updated version came, as far as I can tell, entirely without fanfare. The Ethan Carter Steam page simply notes that anyone who buys the game will get both the original and the Redux versions, and provides a link to The Astronauts blog, which explains the situation in greater detail.

The two games are identical in terms of story, and the "Redux" moniker isn't even entirely official, but a number of improvements have been made. The save system has been modified to save the world state at any point, rather than only areas that have been fully solved, and transitioning between areas will happen almost seamlessly. The Redux version also deals with complaints about excessive backtracking, although for fear of dropping spoilers the post doesn't explain how, and equally cryptically, a section of the game that some players apparently found "too scary and/or too exhausting" has been tweaked to ensure it "flows better."

A number of visual enhancements have been made as well. The studio said most of them are too small to really notice, but the new version now properly supports multiple monitors and non-standard resolutions, and it also features a new option called "Resolution Scale," which can be adjusted based on the capabilities of your PC.

"The game will render internally at twice the current resolution and nicely scale down the image to display it at the current resolution," The Astronauts co-founder Adrian Chmielarz explained. "Such technique produces an image of higher quality than most anti-aliasing solutions. Or, as our graphics programmer insists, 'As an alternative to anti-aliasing, such technique produces the extra pixels to help reduce jagged edges.'"

There is one downside: The original, Unreal Engine 3-powered release of the game plays nicely with low-end rigs, but the Redux edition is more demanding. If you're not running a 64-bit version of Windows and at least 6GB of RAM, you're going to want to stick with the old one.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux is a free update for anyone who already owns the game. It's also on sale, for the next couple of days, for $12/ 9.

Paul Prospero's job description, Supernatural Detective, isn't just awesome, it carries a double meaning. Yes, he's an investigator of the supernatural, visiting Red Creek Valley to solve the mystery of a young boy's disappearance and several gruesome murders with supernatural overtones, but he's also got magical powers himself, able to psychically view the past as a series of ghostly images, like a spectral highlight reel. By examining clues, reconstructing crime scenes, and replaying past events, Paul can piece together the events leading up to Ethan Carter's disappearance... when he's not stopping to gawk at one of the loveliest looking games ever made.

"This game is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand." This is the first thing The Vanishing of Ethan Carter tells you. It feels like a bit of a boast, and it's sort of true. There's only a brief introduction to the first-person adventure, giving you the basic set-up: Ethan Carter wrote a letter to Paranormal Paul, asking for his help. Beyond that, the game trusts you to discover how it works on your own. For example, it doesn't fabricate reasons for you to sprint or crouch in a tutorial segment, like most games do. There aren't quest arrows, and if you're not careful you can walk right past entire story elements without even noticing them. You can even solve the game's mysteries out of order. It s cool with that.

Then again, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter doesn't trust you entirely. It will draw your attention to the crankshaft on the nose of a stalled train, at which point the word Crank? will appear, duplicating itself, swirling in front of your eyes, flooding across the screen as if by pressurized hose with all the subtlety of a pop-up ad. Crank? Crank? Crank? Crank? Crank? Hold on. I'm getting a psychic message here... I think I need to find... a crank? And then crank it? Glad this game doesn't hold my hand. If you reach the end without finding everything, there's a handy map painted on a wall with, well, a bunch of quest arrows, directing you to the puzzles you missed. The point is, while The Vanishing of Ethan Carter doesn't hold your hand in the traditional sense, it still tries awfully hard to make sure you don't miss anything. Thankfully, it's well worth your time to not miss anything.

Specter inspector

At times the floating words, sometimes instructions, sometimes Paul's own internal musings, are absolutely necessary. No, I probably wouldn't have noticed a discolored patch of grass indicating that an object, long dormant there, had recently been moved. On the other hand, upon finding a bloodied corpse lying next to a fire axe, the words "Inspect" hovering over both... well, I might have sussed that out myself.

Paul's abilities don't end with tooltips floating above clues, rather, that's where they begin. After reconstructing a murder scene by finding and replacing a few items, he can conjure up the events that led to the bloody tableau. First, he sees them as a series of images: frozen holograms of ghosts, still and silent, in various phases of the murder. Once you've found them all, you'll need to put them in chronological order by assigning them numbers. Did the couple peer into the crypt before the murder in the graveyard? Or did that happen later?

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. 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. It's an enjoyable activity, sort of like directing a movie without having seen the script. I found it positively thrilling the first time I completed one correctly, though unfortunately, it peaked with that first sequence. 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. Still, even when it's easy, it's good fun.

There are a couple of other types of puzzles as well. 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). I've seen these types of puzzles in games before, but even so, they're very well-made and satisfying to solve here.

Beauty and the mid-to-high-end PC

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter isn't really scary. It's eerie, certainly. It's spooky and unsettling. Despite there only being one real, genuine, board-certified jump-scare—cheap, sure, silly, yes, but still well done—there are plenty of other startling moments, and the general sense of dread and loneliness led to me jumping a number of other times, sometimes just at the sound of Paul's voice as he suddenly decided, after long minutes of silence, to muse out loud. The tension in Ethan Carter comes not from continuously trying to scare you, but from making you continuously think you might be scared at any moment. That's the best kind of tension, and it's entirely successful here.

It s also gorgeous. It's the loveliest outdoor environment I've ever wandered around in. The lighting, the textures, and the attention paid to the foliage and landscape meant I'd wind up stopping every couple of minutes just to look around in admiration. Peering over the edge of the massive dam (and peering back up at it, later, from below), gazing at the sunbeams filtering through the trees, admiring the beautiful decay of abandoned buildings, staring across a bridge, crossing it, and then turning to stare across it from the other end.... I don't care if there are bloody corpses all over the place. I'd live in Red Creek Valley in a second, and possibly, for a second. On my PC—Intel i7 2.8 GhZ, 8GM RAM, Nvidia GeForce 660Ti—it ran remarkably smoothly on maximum settings for such a fine looking game.

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. 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 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 are several long stretches of trail, perfectly enjoyable to walk along and scenery-gaze, but with absolutely nothing going else on. Some will enjoy it, feeling a bit of a Dear Esther vibe; others, I'm sure, will wish there was a bit more to actually do. I enjoyed all my strolls (with the exception of running into invisible barriers occasionally), and never got bored: it's just too damn lovely for that. At times, though, a small part of me was thinking "I've been on this winding trail for ten minutes and found nothing.. are they gonna add some DLC mysteries in here or something?"

Quiet time

When it comes to story, especially one with supernatural elements, developers The Astronauts have exercised remarkable restraint. This is the first game in a long time where I never wanted to skip anything being said, and that's because not all that much is said. On Paul's long nature walks there's ample opportunity for him to be constantly spewing his thoughts and ideas, as protagonists often do when someone isn't calling them on the phone to spew their thought and ideas. While Paul does occasionally murmur some vague filler, he's always brief about it. Written clues are generally only a paragraph or two, and even the ghostly movies are quick and concise. I'm a guy who hammers at the space bar in Skyrim to skip the seemingly endless blather, and I went through much of the Bioshock games repeatedly yelling SHUT UP at the constant, endless stream of story being delivered to my radio. None of that here. Ethan Carter makes the most of its few words, and gives you plenty of silence to think about them yourself. I'm grateful.

I don't feel a game's total running time is of major importance, though I do understand weighing hours played against dollars spent, so here's how I rolled: my first run-through was about four and a half hours, and a good forty minutes of that was spent simply backtracking and poking around for anything I might have missed (and I did miss a few things). I suspect the cleverest and sprint-iest of players could complete the game in three hours. I think the length is just right. It's a short story. It doesn't need to be a novella.

With so much going for it, it's a shame Ethan Carter shoots itself in the foot by not letting me save my game manually. I was playing late at night, for full creepiness, and decided to call it quits and get some sleep. A warning popped up: quitting would lose the progress I'd made since my last autosave. When was my last autosave? No fucking idea. That's the problem with minimal on-screen elements: I never saw the autosave indicator. Fearing I might lose the past half-hour of work, during which I'd found many clues but hadn't solved a puzzle, I trudged on, trying to progress enough to force the game to save again. Twenty minutes later, I solved another puzzle at the other end of the map, though I was annoyed at having to rush through it just because I wanted to go to bed. What's more, when reloading the game the next morning, I'd been returned to the middle of the map, leaving me to wonder if the distant puzzle I'd solved the night before had been saved after all. It had, which I only found out after making another long trek back there.

That annoyance—I won't say it was minor, because it wasn't—was about the only thing I didn't enjoy about The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Visually, it's spectacular. It's tense and the mysteries are enjoyable to solve even when they're not that hard. The voice acting is decent, and while I don't think the story paid off in spectacular fashion, I found it intriguing, mostly satisfying, and most importantly, wonderfully restrained.