An indie odyssey through the inside of an ailing mind
About midway through Ether One, there’s a puzzle where you use a barograph to predict the weather. In a lesser title this would just be eye-catchingly arcane fluff, tossed in without much thought to the context. In this game, it’s a natural extension of the provincial tragedy you’re in the process of reconstructing. Puzzlers as cohesively wrought as Ether One don’t appear that often – and nor, for that matter, do games that wrestle so intelligently with the question of mental illness.
Here you explore a VR sim of the memories of a dementia patient, hoping to ‘cure’ the disease by reassembling key objects and the events to which they’re tied. The setting, a 20th-century Cornish town fallen on hard times, is empty but rife with signs of activity – notes about missing music boxes, coffee machines in need of a good cleaning and toy boats nosing the bank of a reedy brook.
The feel is almost that of a horror game at times, as lovely as the game’s painterly edifices are to behold and explore – the landscape is pure construct, after all, steeped in the anxieties of the mind being treated. Disembodied voices bubble up when you enter certain buildings; some addressing you directly, others snippets from long-ago chats. A frequent radio contact is Phyllis, the researcher in charge of your project. Both ingratiating and callous, she’s easy to distrust but not quite the GLaDOS figure you may be expecting.
Ether One can be completed in two ways. The first is to confine your search to the fluttering ribbons – their nearness indicated by a whispering noise broadcast through the DualShock 4 speaker – that represent the key recollections you need to advance the story. Gather enough per area and you’ll be able to explore and photograph a buried core memory from the Case, an item storage chamber that you access no matter where you are.
Tackled like this, Ether One can be polished off in an evening, but if you do that you’re cheating yourself of its real delights – the few dozen optional puzzles which, when completed, reassembles a film projector and thus some of the backstory’s most affecting revelations. These puzzles are pretty tough and largely reliant on old tricks such as safe combinations that are coded into your surroundings. But they’re seldom unfair – all hinge on observation and the imaginative usage of items.
Ether One is the kind of adventure that makes you look sadly back at virtual shelves loaded with AK47s and laser rifles, mourning a life spent murdering terrorists when you could have been wandering an enigmatic landscape, chin in hand. At its best, it’s also poignant proof that game mechanics can say things about how our minds work, and what happens when they fail. Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
VERDICT
A beautifully judged, moving tale with puzzles cleverly entrenched in the story’s take on mental illness. Providing you take your time with this one, it’s a minor classic.