I have no idea what's causing this game to have such low frame rates on my laptop. Whereas my card was performing as if it were a 710M or something. But still, it ran the way you'd expect from that specific graphics card. The game ran at 30-40 fps (with stuttering and 1 second freezes) on max settings with FXAA.
I logged in on my friend's laptop which has a GT 750M in it (which is significantly less powerful than my GTX 860M) and installed The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. I figured my laptop might be running the game on integrated graphics, but I know of no way to stop it from doing that (already set it to high performance gpu in the Nvidia Control Panel). I tried playing around with the Nvidia Control Panel (might have missed something there though), I have resinstalled the game, I have verified the game cache files on steam. My laptop can handle games like Battlefield 4 and Tomb Raider on almost-ultra settings and still get me frame rates of 40-70. and the game looked really bad at that point. So I turned all the settings to low and ran the game again getting an average frame rate of 25. Turns out I was wrong: when I started the game on max settings with FXAA, my frame rate was around 15-20.
I figured I could run this game with ease since my card is about as powerful as a 750 ti, and that card seems to have no problem running The Vanishing of Ethan Carter at all. I'm gaming on an Alienware 17 with a GTX 860M (I know a custom PC is better and cheaper, guys :P). I recently bought The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on steam.