Mar 25, 2014 Ether One is a first person adventure that deals with the fragility of the human mind. There are two paths in the world you can choose from. At its core is a story exploration path free from puzzles where you can unfold the story at your own pace.
Myst Connections
HIGH Abstract without being pretentious
LOW Relies on text documents to fill in the story too often
WTF Gamebreaking bugs didn't get patched until a month after it hit PS Plus.
Ether One is like a middle-class Myst, and I mean that in a complimentary way.
It's also, perhaps, the perfect exploration-based puzzle game for people who don't like exploration-based puzzle games—itpresents the player with tasks that span whole environments, but story progression is rarely blocked if they're not completed. For someone like me who spends half his time playing and half looking at online guides, this generosity is appreciated.
Ether One puts the player in the role of a nameless worker for a modern, experimental medical company that lets 'Restorers' (as the company calls them) travel through the memories of mentally ill patients to pinpoint moments of deterioration in an attempt to heal them. Most of the game takes place in one specific patient's mind and the player's only connection to the outside world is Phyllis, the doctor who's spearheaded this entire process.
Although she's never shown onscreen, Phyllis walks the player through environments and points of interest as he or she explores the memories. Many times her messages hint at something bigger going on in the real world. For example, players must take her word that the patient is, indeed, safe during the experiment. The faith being asked of me created a tension where I wasn't sure that I was actually doing the right thing by exploring this unwell mind.
The world is made up of four quadrants and a central hub the player can teleport back and forth to. The hub contains storage shelves for items and copies of clues found in the environment. Each area is large, and two are parts of a town that both contain a city block with several buildings to explore. Another is a multi-story factory area with intricate floors.
Although the game is devoid of NPCs, each area contains substantial amounts of environmental storytelling, especially for thorough players. On the other hand, the biggest drawback of the environments is I tended to get lost in them, even after spending a couple of hours in each because there's no in-game map to aid exploration.
The puzzles themselves are handled cleverly in Ether One because, as mentioned, most don't have to be completed to progress. It sounds odd, but the bulk of them exist simply to flesh out the patient's mind and the overall story.
In the factory area, for example, the player can make engineering adjustments throughout each building to start the production line. It's a tedious objective meant for those who love Myst's type of figure-it-out-yourself puzzle solving. The reward is extra information about the patient, the environment and clues about her condition. However, none of this must be completed in order to progress to the next area. However, be aware that every once in a while a puzzle is required to move on, and it's not always clear which ones are mandatory, especially given the game's non-linear environments.
Ether One's most exciting moments occur when abstraction heats up. As the player begins to alter aspects of the patient's mind, he or she gets funneled into unexpected and scary places. Moments from the film Inception came to mind. Although these parts represent what I love most about Ether One, I don't dare spoil it here.
Although I enjoyed Ether One, the game is based entirely on exploration, and unraveling the story is key to its appreciation. Players who don't have the patience for this sort of slow-burn adventure might find that things are fairly incomprehensible if they don't take the time to do some of the non-essential puzzles. However, those who find the idea of a casual stroll through someone's mind would do well to check this one out. Rating: 8 out of 10
Disclosures:Ether One was downloaded as a free PS Plus title on the Playstation 4. Approximately 8 hours were devoted to the main campaign and it was completed. There is no multiplayer.
Parents:Ether One is rated E for Everyone by the ESRB and contains alcohol and tobacco references and mild language. This game is suitable for all audiences.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing: Subtitles are available for all in-game dialogue. Because Ether One is entirely exploration-based, no audio cues are necessary. However, some in-game clues feature audio cues as the player gets closer to the clue. Gameplay might be slightly more difficult because of this, so track down an FAQ if needed.
Corey Motley
Corey Motley (like the Crue) has been gaming since the NES era. The first game he remembers playing is Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest. Horror and stealthy, tactical action games are his jam. Some of his favorites are Silent Hill 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mirror’s Edge, Resident Evil (most of them), Metal Gear Solid 4, Fallout 3 and Hitman: Blood Money.
He has a Bachelor’s in magazine journalism from the University of Missouri. He also has a personal blog (who doesn’t?) that he updates sporadically. He’s been writing for GameCritics.com since 2012 and has appeared on the podcast a handful of times.
If you want to dive deep, type his name into a Google Image search and you’ll most likely be treated to a scandalous picture of his Deus Ex tattoo. He also has a music background from 7 years on high school and college drumlines, and last but not least he’s dabbled in parkour. Don’t let those activities fool you about his ambition – he’s in his late 20s and still has no idea what he wants to do with his life.
He has a Bachelor’s in magazine journalism from the University of Missouri. He also has a personal blog (who doesn’t?) that he updates sporadically. He’s been writing for GameCritics.com since 2012 and has appeared on the podcast a handful of times.
If you want to dive deep, type his name into a Google Image search and you’ll most likely be treated to a scandalous picture of his Deus Ex tattoo. He also has a music background from 7 years on high school and college drumlines, and last but not least he’s dabbled in parkour. Don’t let those activities fool you about his ambition – he’s in his late 20s and still has no idea what he wants to do with his life.
Latest posts by Corey Motley (see all)
- Control Review - September 14, 2019
- Layers Of Fear 2 Review - July 10, 2019
- Hitman 2 Review - December 7, 2018
Tags: Adventure/ExploreEveryoneGame ReviewsPCPS4PuzzleSelf PublishedWhite Paper Games
ETHER One (PC) review'Holding back the waves of chaos, one tiny slice of order at a time.' Ether One provokes unusual behaviour from me.
I started playing it when it released last year. After progressing quite a ways into the campaign, far enough that I could have powered through to the end without much trouble, I set it aside because a mad rush would have meant not playing it properly. I waited until I could do things right.That's the sort of game Ether One is.
You can finish it in four hours or so, merely exploring and solving basic puzzles. That's a valid way to reach a sobering conclusion and watch the credits roll. But there's another way, too, a completely optional one. It forces you deep into the game's virtual world, compels you to explore every corner in an effort to understand each nuance.
That second way tries-and mainly succeeds-at giving actual life to the town of Pinwheel in a way I've not quite seen before in a video game.How? I can’t tell you. That would lead into Spoilers territory. Yes, I know it’s cheap to brandish the “you’ll just have to trust me” card after breaking out the high praise, so that’s not entirely the path I'll take.
Let me say instead that Ether One takes part within the failing mind of a dementia patient. You're asked to venture through memories that you can never be completely sure are stable. The easy way to play would be to explore three environments and pick up memory fragments dotted about the various landscapes. These are represented as red ribbons and, even if all you worry about is gathering them, you're in for a powerful experience.
You’re not there by chance, after all; you’re a restorer, a visitor trekking through personified memories and trying to solidify a patient’s struggling memories in an effort to save them.Locating ribbons doesn't require much of you. Just explore the environments and keep an eye out for those vibrant red things fluttering lightly in the breeze. Each one unlocks a small snippet of plot, narrated by the patient’s physician who serves as your guide from the outside world. There are eight ribbons in each location.
Discovering all of them grants you access to a core memory, with the theory being that if you can unlock enough of them, your actions may repair the patient’s mind. That’s a practical enough reason to hunt down ribbons, and also provides subtle justification to get lost in the little pocket worlds provided.You don't need to go into Pinwheel Village’s blacksmith forge and learn how, during the patient’s youth, blacksmithing within the village began to stray from indispensable function to obsolescence. Or how the smith slipped quietly into depression as he watched his chosen trade slowly die. You learn this if you do explore, though, from the narration offered by the doctor as well as from a voice more directly linked to the memories. One approach offers facts and the other insight, talking about how heartbreaking it was to see the smith retreat into himself over the years, despite still being able to produce items of immense beauty that he would sell to try and eke out a living.
The tale of the smith is largely irrelevant to Ether One’s plot, but it’s absolutely vital to the world the game attempts to build.Your search for ribbons also turns up handwritten notes left by various inhabitants. These describe everyday life, offering important glimpses of tragic loss or lackadaisical normality. What you find is sometimes at odds with the explanations offered to you by the dual narrators and you can, if you wish, delve deeper into the game and seek out your own answers. The reality is rarely black and white, almost always open to your interpretation. You are, after all, dealing with a confused mind. Anything you see and hear could very well be unreliable and muddled. One narrator might tell you that you’re going the right way, towards something important, before suddenly losing faith in herself and telling you that perhaps you should return the way you came.
The other tells you that no direction is really incorrect. They’re both right, as well as completely wrong.You don’t need to explore all of this, but why wouldn't you?
There are numerous secrets to reveal, but the projectors are the main reason to lose yourself in Ether One’s mini-worlds. Dotted around the landscapes are broken projectors, which you can repair by correcting a subtle wrong in the surrounding environment. Only the first one of these, encountered in the tutorial-esque stage of Devlin Mine, must be tended to. You are asked to return a missing book to a nearby desk.
The chore seems simple enough, but you’ll need to find a way to delve deeper into the mine itself in order to complete you task, which forces you to use the items around you to overcome a large, pressurised door.There are items scattered everywhere throughout the game, but most of them are useless to you or they exist in a setting where they don’t belong. This dynamic underscores the fact that you’re trapped in an unreliable world. In a hidden and completely optional level, you'll encounter a puzzle wherein you need to fit a valve to a steam pipe.
You can find this valve quite easily in a lower portion of the same stage but, strangely, you can also find one in the idyllic Pinwheel Village, which is a location entirely free of giant steam pipes. Little out-of-place items rarely jump out and announce themselves but, as you progress further, you discover hints and clues that tell you things aren’t quite right.
In a factory setting, you need to solve a portion of a puzzle by banging on pipes in a certain order. That makes contextual sense when it is introduced because it served as a low-tech way of communicating with other workers in the vicinity.
The mechanic also pops up several times elsewhere in the game, out of context in what I first believed to be a time saving exercise by the developers so they could recycle puzzle assets. But what if that's not what it is? What if the dementia is at work, taking separate disintegrating memories and trying to ram them together like two jigsaw pieces that aren’t supposed to fit?Fixing projectors gives you glances of the person you’re trying to save, the individual who once existed before the dementia started taking hold.
I tracked down and repaired every last one, spending hours wandering corridors as I tried to find some clue how to power up an engine or ferreting out the secrets behind a small shrine. I completed a model yacht race and restored a local inventor's office. I fixed work schedules, projected shipping forecasts and made someone’s boss a cup of coffee.
I completed everyday chores we take for granted so I could restore order in a chaotic mind struggling to hold itself together. That effort creates a creeping, enveloping involvement as you venture ever deeper into the world of Ether One. It drip feeds relevance and offers an avalanche of tiny revelations that are easy to dismiss as irrelevant on their own, but which collectively are too powerful to ignore.5/ 5. © 1998-2020 HonestGamersNone of the material contained within this site may be reproduced in any conceivable fashion without permission from the author(s) of said material. This site is not sponsored or endorsed by Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, or any other such party.
ETHER One is a registered trademark of its copyright holder. This site makes no claim to ETHER One, its characters, screenshots, artwork, music, or any intellectual property contained within. Opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily represent the opinion of site staff or sponsors. Staff and freelance reviews are typically written based on time spent with a retail review copy or review key for the game that is provided by its publisher.