I was slightly surprised when I woke up this morning with a PR-mail in my inbox from a studio called “The Astronauts”. It’s apparently a studio consisting of former People Can Fly employees (the studio that made Painkiller), but more importantly, they are making a horror game!
According to what I was told through the mail, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a disturbing horror game in which you play a detective that has the ability to visualize crime scenes. You are tasked with tracing down a kidnapped boy when you find the deceased body of one of the kidnappers in the mountain. This is the start of a trail and with your supernatural abilities and modern detective tools, you follow it deep into the valley. The game will run on the Unreal Engine, which was also used in the recent Devil May Cry, but so far that’s all we really know about this title.
In a statement released by the studio: “There are lots of great things about the big world of AAA games, but there’s even more appeal to us in making games that feel and are personal, and where the only censors are the creators and the public. We want to make games which we are 100% responsible for. By starting The Astronauts we went back to the way we were ten years ago, when we were making Painkiller and were doing it completely our way. The game that we’re making right now could not be more different, but the studio spirit seems to be exactly the same.”
It sounds like an “okay” idea to me; it has the potential to be good, but the premise alone doesn’t really excite me that much. Sounds like a winner to you guys and girls?
