The Vanishing of Ethan Carter announced

The Astronauts is a game developer built by the three original founders of People Can Fly - the development studio responsible for Painkiller, Bulletstorm and the upcoming Gears of War: Judgment. Residing in Warsaw, Poland, The team have now revealed their next project - a weird fiction horror game titled The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is due out this year on PC and it will utilise the Unreal Engine 3. The primary focus of the game will be exploration - a bit of a departure for the experienced FPS developers, but I'm incredibly excited nonetheless. Embedded below is the debut teaser for the game, which certainly looks pretty. As it's a Youtube clip it will be metered content, but I'll be sure to update the post once it hits our library. What do you think of this game, does it sound like your kind of thing? Let us know in the comments below!



The game follows a detective with the ability to visualise crime scenes. Investigating the kidnapping of a young boy, he travels to a secluded mountain area where he find a severely mutilated corpse of... one of the kidnappers. He then has to use his abilities, both natural and supernatural, to save the boy, figure out what is going on and live to tell the tale.

Weird fiction refers to a blend of genres like fantasy, sci-fi and horror, with the threat of opposition by immensely powerful and unknowable beings. The most popular weird fiction writer is no doubt HP Lovecraft, whose Cthulu mythos has been hugely influential on creators across the spectrum of media. There aren't many weird fiction games however - Amnesia and The Secret World being probably the most recent and best known examples. I don't know about you, but I would like to see more - I don't care for Lovecraft, but I do like the Cthulu setting and I love me some unknowable horror.