No matter how spooky a spooky game’s rocks may be, it’s always comforting to know they can’t really hurt you. Unless, that is, they’re actually real rocks scanned into the game with fancy technology, and the original is still lurking out there somewhere in the mist, waiting to trip you. That’s the true terror of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, the non-combative horror walk ‘em up from Bulletstorm veterans The Astronauts. The gang are showing off their mastery of the arcane science of photogrammetry, or smooshing loads of photos together to make a 3D model.

The big idea is that with a game world built of scanned real objects rather than the same handful of repeating and tiling hand-made art, they say, players will “stop seeing assets and start seeing the world.” Which is presumably helpful when trying to scare the kecks off visitors to it. … [visit site to read more]