Soundtrack: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter — chords with the third removed, built to make you walk

Introduction — the chord that refuses to decide, on the first step into the valley

You're dropped into a valley with no map and no HUD, and the moment you take your first step, what plays isn't a melody but a chord that seems to float in midair. It's built almost entirely from fourths and fifths, with the note in the middle — the third, the one note that would commit the chord to major or minor on the spot — deliberately left out. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, the 2014 first-person mystery from Poland's The Astronauts, was scored by Mikolai Stroinski, back when he was still mostly unknown. Komugi's review pulls a pattern from the Steam review pool: praise arrives, almost without exception, in the order scenery, then music, with story trailing in third place or later. I picked this record today because I wanted to check, from outside the story, why the music earns that second place.

Roughly BPM 50 — though at this point it's fair to ask whether counting a beat even means anything, the gap between one chord and the next is stretched that loose. At the center sits 'Ethan's Theme,' played on solo piano — the bare melody, before anyone dressed it in an orchestra. Long string tones and blurred-edged pads gather around it later. The instrument count stays small. And yet, for something this sparse, what comes through most is just how wide the valley is. That's the trick I want to peek behind today.

The hidden link — one theme, scattered in disguise

'Ethan's Theme' was written early in development, still as an unorchestrated solo piano sketch, and the dev team liked it so much they left it untouched, Stroinski recalled in an interview with the Game Audio Network Guild (audiogang.org, 2015). From there, most of the melodic cues on the album function as 'variations' of that theme — not by quoting it outright, but by borrowing exactly one thing from it at a time: its melodic shape, or its rhythm, or one distinguishing interval.

That design maps directly onto the game's own structure. All a player does in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is find the bodies and clues scattered across the valley and reorder the fragmented events into the sequence they actually happened in. A single truth, seeded across multiple locations as disguised fragments. The score does the same thing — one theme, stripped down to just its shape, or just its rhythm, or just an interval, slipped into some other cue on the album. If a player ever gets the feeling 'wait, didn't I hear this somewhere before,' that feeling is probably this unnamed scattering, doing its quiet work.

A puzzle-specific trait — harmony that refuses to resolve, matched to a mapless gait

Before writing a note, Stroinski built out written documents on emotion, instrumentation, and harmony — a process closer to architectural planning than composing. What he then did deliberately was refuse to let the harmony resolve, and dilute the interval between one chord and the next. Favoring fourths and fifths over thirds is a choice that keeps a chord from ever concluding 'this is major' or 'this is minor,' and the whole score ends up with an 'open' feel as a result.

That openness pairs with the game's own kind of unhelpfulness — no map, no HUD, no arrow pointing anywhere. No time limit, no hints; you just walk the valley at whatever pace you like and crouch wherever you like to pick up a clue. Music that keeps drifting without ever handing you a harmonic 'answer' shares the same posture as a game that leaves you without a destination 'answer.' Many of the deduction puzzles I've covered before — Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol — mark the moment of the correct answer (a name locked in, a picture completed) with a clean, audible break. Ethan Carter's harmony carries that break almost all the way to the end before it lets you have it.

The analogy — a chord held in suspense, and a chorus allowed exactly once

In terms of solving speed, this game sits at the opposite end from an impatient deduction puzzle. Obra Dinn and Golden Idol keep tempo in units of 'one verdict, one certainty'; in Ethan Carter, far more of your time is spent walking over a long sustained tone without any certainty at all. I usually talk about the analogy between puzzle-solving tempo and musical tempo in units of beats or loops, but for this game the unit becomes something else entirely: the distance still left before the harmony resolves.

And that suspension really is held back all the way to the very end. The album's final track is the Credits Vocal Mix of 'Valley of the Blinding Mist' — the same theme, but for the first time with a voice on top of it, for the first time landing cleanly on a key. After hours of chords that kept refusing to decide, this one chorus, allowed exactly once, works almost unfairly well. Only at the moment the whole case finally lines up does the music line up with it too. That coincidence is, I think, the entire reason I fell for this score.

Tracks worth hearing

If just one, then Ethan's Theme ↗ (from the official label Sumthing Else Music Works' SoundCloud). Here is the theme's raw, unorchestrated solo-piano outline, before anyone dressed it up. It's a fun listen once you know fragments of this one turn up hidden all over the album.

Save this one for last: Valley of the Blinding Mist (Credits Vocal Mix) ↗ (same official label). After hours of chords that refuse to resolve, this is the one track that finally gets a key — and a voice. For the whole 17-track album in one sitting, there's the official Sumthing Else Music Works SoundCloud playlist ↗, and if you'd rather own a copy, the official Steam soundtrack DLC ↗.

Closing — what I'd steal if I were writing this

If I were writing music, here's what I'd steal. First: write the theme bare, on one plain instrument — piano, voice, whatever — before you think about orchestration at all. That part can wait. Second: when you bring the theme back later, don't quote it whole. Take out exactly one thing — its shape, or its rhythm, or one interval — and leave the rest behind. Hide everything and no one notices; show everything and there's no craft left. Ethan Carter runs on that exact one-thing-at-a-time restraint, start to finish.

And one more, over a black coffee: don't spend your resolution early. Hold hours' worth of chords in 'not yet' for as long as you can stand, and grant a key — and a voice — exactly once, right at the very end. Everything that came before is worth the wait for that single moment. Next time I pull this record out, I think I'll sit with it in a room, rather than walking a valley.

Reference links

・Game Audio Network Guild: Mikolai Stroinski discusses The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Soundtrack (composing process, harmonic design, variations on Ethan's Theme)

・filmmusic.com: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Soundtrack (label Sumthing Else Music Works, release date, full 17-track listing)

・Sumthing Else Music Works official SoundCloud: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Original Soundtrack (full playlist)

・Steam: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Soundtrack (official OST DLC)

・Wikipedia: Mikolai Stroinski (biography, credits including The Witcher 3)

・Puzzlebyrinth: Komugi's review — The Vanishing of Ethan Carter