The gameplay is set within a virtual world, where players assume the role of a "Restorer", tasked with reconstructing the memories of a dementia patient.

As the studio's debut title, Ether One focuses on exploration, puzzle-solving, and narrative, featuring themes centered around mental illness and memory retrieval.

A PlayStation 4 version was released on 5 May 2015, which rebuilt the entire game in Unreal Engine 4, allowing for graphical enhancements and additional language support.

[2] Gradually, the player makes sense of the patient's chronology and reassembles the timeline of events, aided by mysterious artifacts that appear in the various memory simulations.

[3] Players have the ability to teleport to a hub area called "The Case", a virtual room where objects collected from memories can be stored.

[10][11] Many of these items are of little relevance to the game's plot, encouraging players to collect a diverse array of objects and underscoring the uncertainty of what may be significant.

[5] As players dictate the pace of their exploration, the narrative gradually becomes clearer with the uncovering of memories, notes, and phone recordings in each location.

Once inside Jean’s mind, the Restorer navigates her childhood memories of Pinwheel, a seaside village in England that heavily relies on tin and iron mining.

Throughout the journey, the Restorer learns about the village’s residents, a tragic mining accident that claimed the lives of many citizens, and Jean’s growing relationship with a boy named Thomas, whom she eventually marries.

With her help, and with memories of Jean encouraging him, Thomas navigates through his traumatic childhood, where his mother left his alcoholic father (who later died in a home accident).

[3][12] Several team members met at university and began collaborating on ideas that led to Ether One's conception in 2011; the studio was officially formed in 2012.

Aware of their small size, the team decided not to pursue high fidelity in graphics, instead focusing on pragmatic visual choices for what appeared on-screen.

[13] During development, the prominence of a particular lighthouse location in the narrative increased, leading the team to enhance its visual presence in the game so that players could almost always see it in the distance.

[12] His prior experience with experimental music informed a freeform approach to the game's composition, with each level featuring its own unique melody and instrumentation.

[18] The team lacked experience with development best practices, such as source control, and relied on a pen drive to store the latest version of the game.

[19] To optimize performance for the original PlayStation 4 version, the team removed large sections of levels to address unoptimized assets.

Additionally, the team initially lacked their own internet connection, relying on an Ethernet cable from an upstairs neighbor and uploading Steam builds from a corridor.

[13] Regarding the game's portrayal of dementia, Bottomley stated that the team did not aim to necessarily raise awareness of the disease, but rather to start a dialogue and put the player in the perspective of someone suffering from it.

[19][15] The team incorporated visual metaphors for the disease into the game, such as "ether rocks" that are destroyed by the player, which mirror the shape of a Lewy body inside the brain of a dementia sufferer.

Sam Prell of Joystiq highlighted the haunting quality of the environments, and favourably compared the game's narrative structure to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

[40] Richard Cobbett of IGN admired how the game crafted a "hauntingly cryptic atmosphere", gradually revealing the town of Pinwheel for exploration.

[2] Angus Morrison of PC Gamer described the narrative as a "tragic saga of dementia, death, and industrial decline" that players discover rather than are told.

[8] Prell offered both praise and criticism, noting that while the plot occasionally dropped threads, it was cohesive enough to make players empathize with the Restorer's plight.

[39] Chris Priestman of Kill Screen called the story "very Dickensian,"[41] while John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun observed that the puzzles began as fulfilling and grounded but became more obtuse and dull as the game progressed.

However, he also remarked on the difficulty of balancing accurate portrayals of conditions with engaging gameplay, suggesting the game offered limited new insights into dementia.

[3] Hansen of Destructoid praised the simulation of the condition, describing the game's approach as a reverse Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

He also praised its lack of violence, noting that with the absence of weapons, Ether One differed from other exploratory games like The Stanley Parable or Gone Home.

[37] Robert Workman of GameCrate criticized the slow pacing of certain puzzles, stating they were drawn out to the point of frustration, and lamented the absence of a hint system.