Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture makes you an observer rather than a participant in its drama, and at times the lack of interactivity is frustrating. None of these activities is going to exactly challenge many players, even if it is perfectly possible to get left behind if you’re not paying attention when following a trail.ĭoes this matter? In a sense, it does. Instead, what gameplay there is comes down to following the trails, interacting with a few key objects and a kind of ‘tuning in’ manoeuvre with the DualShock 4 controller when you reach some scenes. Of course, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture faces the same challenge so many other narrative-led games have faced: how do you give the player a sense of agency, and make them feel like they’re actually playing a game? Here The Chinese Room doesn’t take any obvious route, ignoring puzzles, hostile forces to run and hide from and even basic tasks like collecting objects or notes. From its tranquil cottage gardens to its rocky streams and forest paths, this is a seriously beautiful game. And while the landscape might pack a suspicious amount of scenic beauty into one area, the lush planting, all gently moving in the breeze, is right on the money. Even the insides of the vans and cars have the right look and feel. Houses have the kind of jumbled, inelegant interiors you might associate with rural areas of the period. It’s not 100 per cent authentic and there are oddities, like the fact that everyone in the area seems to have the exact same make and model of radio, but it is believable. The landscape in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is every bit as beautiful as The Vanishing’s, but it’s so much more lifelike and detailed, resurrecting the sights, sounds and textures of an England that itself vanished years ago. It’s a game where you feel directed rather than placed on rails, and while Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture puts some limitations on your exploration, you’re still free to roam and discover to a large extent.Īs with The Astronaut’s The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a lot of time and effort has gone into making Yaughton and its environs a place worth exploring. A crackling noise with hints of speech will drag you back into some scenario. A ringing phone or the sound of bells might pull you in the right direction. Beyond following strange lights you’ll find yourself pulled in by a range of audio cues. There are trails you can follow through the game, and The Chinese Room has been extremely clever about how these work. It’s not that one player will have an entirely different experience of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture than another, but each experience will feel different and give you different information and a different slant on the story, even as each leads to the same conclusion. Others only trigger once you’ve triggered other sequences, and here the way and order that you do things seems – and it’s hard to be sure exactly what’s going on here – crucial. Some you can find in any order, just through wandering the Yaughton valley. ![]() This is a story-led game in the style of The Chinese Room’s earlier Dear Esther or Fullbright’s Gone Home, but it’s one where you put the story together piece by piece, finding snippets in mysteriously persistent phone calls and radio broadcasts, or in reconstructed scenes played out by spectres formed from glowing trails of light. That doesn’t mean that either is predictable or linear. ![]() In any case, we’ll keep things as spoiler-free as humanly possible because, in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the game and the narrative are indistinguishable from each other. The smartest thing you could do right now is purchase and download the game, play it, then come back and read the rest. By taking inspiration from a very British vein of sci-fi, and most specifically the fifties novels of John Wyndham, the team at The Chinese Room have created a post-apocalyptic game unlike any other, as locked into a place and era as Kubrick’s 2001, the Quatermass movies or Tarkovsky’s films of Solaris and Stalker.įrankly, the less you know going in, the better. There may be odd signs that not everything is right, but this is an apocalypse where the victims appear to have quietly disappeared, leaving a radio blaring in the garden, doors unlocked, a van left open on the side of the road. It’s a very English kind of apocalypse one that takes place without much fuss or obvious violence or screaming in a quiet Shropshire valley in the mid-1980s.
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