ETHER One (PC) review

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. Not really. 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.

Credit: White Paper Games

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.

Credit: White Paper Games

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.

Credit: White Paper Games

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...