Based on the 2014 first-person horror title, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter VR supports Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. It offers two settings – Normal for full movement and Comfort for a less strenuous time. Since its launch, the VR version has received 167 user reviews on Steam, with 56 percent positive, resulting in a “Mixed” rating.

The Astronauts are working on Witchfire, a dark fantasy rogue-lite first-person shooter in early access for PC on the Epic Games Store. The Ghost Galleon patch revamped several systems, and the developer is working on two new maps while revamping the difficulty. The first will be small next to the existing locations (and arrives in the next patch), while the second is large to a “mind-blowing” degree. Stay tuned for further details in the coming weeks.

In a recent interview with GamingBolt, when asked that very question, The Astronauts’ co-founder and creative director Adrian Chmielarz said that heading in a completely different direction with Witchfire was a conscious effort on the studio’s part, because it felt that “the times of walking sims were over”. Chmielarz said that though the genre is capable of delivering “wonderful” experiences, their “limited” shelf life encouraged the studio to “look in new directions.”

“We knew the times of walking sims were over,” Chmielarz said. “These games are one trick ponies and yes, you can do wonderful things with them – like the last well known walking sim, What Remains of Edith Finch – but their shelf life is limited. So we started to look in new directions.”

In addition to that, Chmielarz added that, given the fact that the development team’s core members had previously worked on the likes of Bulletstorm and Painkiller, wanting to return to the first-person shooter genre was just as much of a factor in the change in direction.

“We’ve done Painkiller and Bulletstorm, literally the core minds behind those games are now in The Astronauts. So it didn’t take long for us to hear the call of a gun,” he said.

In our review of Witchfire’s early access release, we awarded it a score of 8/10, saying, “Witchfire is a game rife with potential that will hopefully be realized throughout its stint in early access. It has an addictive gameplay loop that makes you attempt at least ‘one more run’ thanks to its fast-paced melding of first-person gunplay and magic. The only real downside right now is the relative lack of content.” Read the full review through here.

Witchfire is currently available on PC, exclusively via the Epic Games Store. It will remain in early access for “about a year”, during which The Astronauts plans to release several updates.

System Shock Remake (2023)

System Shock is considered to be one of the most important games of its time, as it was one of the earliest pioneers of systemic game design applied in a first-person space. But even apart from it, System Shock is an impressive game with a gripping story and a detailed world with plenty of lore to surround it all. Nightdive was hard at work on a full-fledged remake of the original, and System Shock Remake was finally released earlier this year to great reviews. It does a great job of modernizing this classic with plenty of clever design tricks and changes that make this experience a more digestible one for fans accustomed to modern first-person games. 

Of course, adventures that would otherwise be impossible – like surviving in a jungle and searching for ancient treasure – become all the more tenable in a video game. So let’s take a look at 10 games that had great forest and jungle settings along with what made them so unique.

Far Cry 2

The sequel is more popular – and responsible for establishing the current formula of the series – but there’s just something so appealing about Far Cry 2’s setting. As a mercenary sent in to hunt The Jackal, an arms dealer contributing to both sides in the war, players navigate through sweeping forests, plains and intricate jungles with a wide range of vehicles, from boats to hang gliders.

Malaria is also a factor, requiring the player to treat it with medicine or risk death, and there are limited healing supplies. The world itself feels alive with various animals roaming about, and physics influencing the environment, like fire that spreads naturally to surroundings. It’s not the most story-driven experience but the survival mechanics coupled with simply exploring the world as your Buddies lay out the next objective is still fairly unique.

Layers of Fear

Though not the most innovative horror game by any means, Bloober Team’s Layers of Fear was significant. Following the studio’s failure with Basement Crawl, Layers of Fear presented a complete shift with its mature storyline and macabre atmosphere. As such, the game showcased Unity’s power in twisted settings with excellent fidelity, creating disturbing sights at a decent clip.

Dark Souls

The epitome of games that don’t hold your hand. From Software’s challenging hack and slash title provides a few basic instructions and then thrusts you into a world of pain. Forget the Poise debates of Dark Souls 3 or whether Dark Souls 2 was even any good – many players had a tough time just surviving in this age of fire and darkness. Where to go, what to do, whether you should kill that guy praising the sun abd so on and so forth. Of course, thanks to the summoning and message systems, players could actually help each other through tough situations. This ironically resulted in one of the more helpful communities out there.

Gamingbolt got in touch with Adrian Chmielarz of The Astronauts to discuss how they approached Xbox One X enhancements, a potential PS4 Pro patch and more.

"I think for the way that Ethan works under the hood and the way we optimized it… We never really hit any eSRAM issues with the Xbox One."

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was patched to support the Xbox One X and it bought a number of improvements including three different modes supporting 1080p, 1440p and a full native 4K presentation. How hard was it to implement three different modes?

That part was super easy. I mean, the PC version obviously can do any resolution. So as soon as XOX was released and these resolutions became available, we’ve simply added an option to choose them and voila.

What was way more work was to make sure the game runs smoothly when running in higher resolution. Now that’s something that took many months to do. It’s mostly a mix of just graphic artists optimizing the content without losing the visual quality, and merging the game with the latest version of UE4 that has some optimizations on its own.

Curiously, the PS4 Pro doesn’t have these many options. Is there a specific reason why this is the case?

It’s just that PS4 Pro was not available when we released Ethan on PS4. We don’t even have the Pro devkits. We’ll analyze if it makes commercial sense to purchase them, but if it will, then of course we’ll add the higher res option. Not sure if we’ll go for the real 4K or an upscale from, say, 1440p, it all depends on the performance. It’s hard to say until we buy the kits.

The Xbox One X doesn’t feature eSRAM. How did this helped development given the pain it bought on the base Xbox One?

I think for the way that Ethan works under the hood and the way we optimized it… We never really hit any eSRAM issues with the Xbox One.

While developing this patch, how difficult was it port over the 4K textures, assets etc from the PC build to the Xbox One X?

Not difficult at all. That’s the beauty of using an engine as mature as UE4.

"I don’t have a direct comparison, because we don’t have the Pro kits. I know that on paper XOX is currently the most powerful console, but that’s all I know, really."

The Xbox One X features a pretty powerful GPU but a weak CPU. How did you balance this out?

Most games are not really burning your CPUs anyway. Play anything and watch the processor idling a lot of times. It’s not like games use it as extensively as, say, when you encode a video file.

Also, Ethan is not really a game that requires a lot of CPU power. For example, we don’t really have any enemies and AI to take care of.

How does the Xbox One X compare against the PS4 Pro?

I don’t have a direct comparison, because we don’t have the Pro kits. I know that on paper XOX is currently the most powerful console, but that’s all I know, really.

Do you think the Xbox One X is powerful enough to render high end AAA games at native 4K?

After what Naughty Dog does with PS4, it’s clear that everything is possible.

How does the Xbox One X compare against modern gaming PCs?

You can get a respectable performance relatively cheaply, and you get a very nice ecosystem, I think Xbox Live is just fantastic. But if you’re an advanced user and can afford a ninja PC? Your gaming adventures will also be very memorable, in a slightly different way.

What to choose? I solved this problem by having all platforms available in my mancave. Obviously I know this is not a solution for everyone. It’s really hard for me to say which platform I’d go for if I had to live with only one.

"I am lucky enough to have all possible consoles, and after 30 years of playing video games, I can say with some degree of conviction that pure power of a platform is not that meaningful. I like my 4K Dark Souls on PC as much as you do, but these days I also look for things like convenience or ecosystem."

Microsoft doesn’t allow Xbox One X exclusives. Do you think this will hold back developers from using the full potential of the system?

Honestly, no. Most games can scale down from XOX to XBO, e.g. by using LOD on characters earlier, having lower res, using simpler path-finding, etc. I’ve never seen a game that couldn’t be done on a weaker version of the current gen console.

Let’s not forget that in you really want to unleash XOX, you need to go 4K or at least use some spectacular upscale from a HD+ resolution. Meaning you already get a performance hit, possibly bringing you almost back on par with the regular XBO with 1080p.

Which PC GPU do you think the Xbox One X GPU comes close to in terms of overall performance?

No idea. I could Google that, but that’s be cheating. I know it’s good, but no idea what would be the PC equivalent. It’s not that easy to determine, because there’s many factors to consider, like things that are different in the architecture.It’s not all just about the pure theoretical GPU power.

Is there anything else you want to tell us before we let you go?

I am lucky enough to have all possible consoles, and after 30 years of playing video games, I can say with some degree of conviction that pure power of a platform is not that meaningful. I like my 4K Dark Souls on PC as much as you do, but these days I also look for things like convenience or ecosystem. For example, while I knew that way more Destiny 1 players chose PS4 as their platform of choice here in Poland, I went for the Xbox version simply because I think Xbox gamepads are better for shooters.

And if the game was available on PC? I would still get the Xbox version, because I just love playing using a gamepad and I wouldn’t want to fight KBM users in the multiplayer.

All I’m saying is that, again, pure power is just a factor, but not even a deciding one for me.

The Xbox One X is the most powerful home console ever made- we know this. But how powerful is most powerful, really? Apparently, powerful enough that developers are wary of committing to trying to define the system in concrete or analogous terms. Which, to be fair, makes sense- after all, modern technology is nuanced enough that 1:1 comparisons rarely make sense.

And that’s what Adrian Chmielarz of The Astronauts, the folks behind The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, told GamingBolt in an exclusive interview. Asked about what PC GPU would be the most equivalent to the Xbox One X’s, Chmielarz said, “No idea. I could Google that, but that’s be cheating. I know it’s good, but no idea what would be the PC equivalent. It’s not that easy to determine, because there’s many factors to consider, like things that are different in the architecture. It’s not all just about the pure theoretical GPU power.”

He also said that native 4K AAA games could be possible on the Xbox One X, in the hands of talented developers, citing the example of Naughty Dog, and what they are able to get from the PS4’s hardware. “After what Naughty Dog does with PS4, it’s clear that everything is possible.”

Chmielarz also discussed how the Xbox One X’s weaker CPU was balanced against its much stronger CPU, noting that games are often not CPU intensive anyway- and Ethan Carter certainly was not. “Most games are not really burning your CPUs anyway,” he said. “Play anything and watch the processor idling a lot of times. It’s not like games use it as extensively as, say, when you encode a video file.

“Also, Ethan is not really a game that requires a lot of CPU power. For example, we don’t really have any enemies and AI to take care of.”

All of this is of course sensible- that said, no developers are working at exclusively plumbing the Xbox One X hardware and what it has to offer (even Microsoft’s own developers are working on PC and Xbox games, which means they have to tune their games for more hardware configurations).

The Xbox One X is the most powerful console ever made- Microsoft’s overhauled Xbox One system beefs up its GPU and memory capacity substantially, while also iterating on its CPU functionality a bit. The end result of this is a system that can churn out some fairly substantially impressive visuals.

But how does the Xbox One X compare to something like a gaming PC? Apparently it does fine, although that has more to do with the out of the box ecosystem it provides than anything else, according to Adrian Chmielarz of The Astronauts, the folks behind The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

“You can get a respectable performance relatively cheaply, and you get a very nice ecosystem, I think Xbox Live is just fantastic. But if you’re an advanced user and can afford a ninja PC? Your gaming adventures will also be very memorable, in a slightly different way,” he said.

He did note, however, that he likes having all systems as a gamer, and that for him, having to choose just one is extremely difficult.

“What to choose? I solved this problem by having all platforms available in my mancave. Obviously I know this is not a solution for everyone. It’s really hard for me to say which platform I’d go for if I had to live with only one.”

For now, it seems like the Xbox One X continues to perform at a sustained level, at least in the US- so it is clear that its proposition of being the most powerful console ever made is something that has value to a fairly substantial number of users.

I think one of the most valuable things that the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X have brought with them to the console market is the long exclusive to the domain of PC gaming ability to have multiple options to select and tailor your game experience with. Games now routinely let players pick graphical options to prioritize visuals, resolution, or framerate, and that’s great.

On the Xbox One X, at least, it sounds like these options are really easy to implement for developers- especially those already familiar with PC game development. Speaking to GamingBolt in an exclusive interview, Adrian Chmielarz of The Astronauts talked about how easy those new options were for them to add.

“That part was super easy. I mean, the PC version obviously can do any resolution. So as soon as XOX was released and these resolutions became available, we’ve simply added an option to choose them and voila,” he said.

“What was way more work was to make sure the game runs smoothly when running in higher resolution. Now that’s something that took many months to do. It’s mostly a mix of just graphic artists optimizing the content without losing the visual quality, and merging the game with the latest version of UE4 that has some optimizations on its own.”

He also explained why they don’t have so many options available for the PS4 Pro- and it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a case of bad timing all around.

“It’s just that PS4 Pro was not available when we released Ethan on PS4. We don’t even have the Pro devkits,” he said. “We’ll analyze if it makes commercial sense to purchase them, but if it will, then of course we’ll add the higher res option. Not sure if we’ll go for the real 4K or an upscale from, say, 1440p, it all depends on the performance. It’s hard to say until we buy the kits.”

I can understand that reasoning, and it makes sense too, given that they are a small development outfit in the end. I can only hope that they will end up adding as many options as makes sense for PS4 Pro players to enjoy as well.