The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
Fair · Narrative · 2014
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 3.8h
- Value
- $5.26/hr
- Reviews
- 88% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 6 GB of memory, DirectX11 compliant card with 1GB of VRAM, 9 GB of storage. Windows only.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a first-person story-driven mystery. Purchase this game to get both the original and the Unreal Engine 4 remaster called The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
July 2024 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. 67 discounts in the 12 years on record. They run about 80 percent off, roughly 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 17 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 93 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 88 percent. Among the games that feel like it, The Painscreek Killings ($19.99, scores 66) beats it on value, while it beats Homesick ($14.99, scores 32).
1 of the 478 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here comes from a buyer who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 75 percent of the 1,274 reviews written there were positive, against 88 percent overall, and those are 19 percent of everything written about it.
At 3.8 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
The drop-off
42% start to 9% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
4 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Beautifully looking short walking detective simulator with, even after all this years (as in 2026). The story isn't particularly revulutionary but it has slight Cthulhu vibes and I followed it with enjoyment. Great thing is that we are actually able to 'run/sprint', which lets the player stay awake if there is a need to cover bigger distances, not all walking simulators have that option, so it's worth mentioning...
There are many people complimenting the story of this game, but in my opinion, only the plot is surprising and that's it, the buildup and journey should've been the main focus for such a game and not the destination. There are undoubtedly far better story games out there. First of all, you may need a guide, otherwise it is going to take you way longer than it should to solve some cases without excessive...
I have no idea what to do or what's going on. Needs instructions/directions as the areas can be big.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter scores 52/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/258520/the-vanishing-of-ethan-carterThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 16, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.