It’s no surprise that the highest grossing movies are usually lined with explosions and the loudest music is often the dumbest. Videogames, when they’re not identified with bleeps and bloops from thirty-year-old sound libraries, are synonymous with spectacular spreads of violence, yelling, and action. Pacing being what it is, games will occasionally slow down for exposition or other manual adjustments, but these sequences are always treated like intermissions between acts. Your thirty seconds of fun are queued, so get ready for the bell.
There is nothing wrong with this. I like a great number of these games and it seems you do too, but I wish there was more room to play around in the margins. Tranquility, it seems, is an undervalued resource.
Enter the Walking Simulator. This is a term that I regret invoking because it’s usually deployed to debase whatever it’s being used to describe, but it’s nevertheless become acceptable shorthand for, ” first-person exploration focused, narrative heavy experience with little regard for traditional game systems or win-loss scenarios.” As fidelity has increased, so has a smaller game’s ability to tell a visual story; it’s not a novelty, it’s almost compulsory. Popularized by Dear Esther and spun around by Gone Home, Eidolon, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, “walking simulators” have made an honest case for divergent interactive applications.
So leave it to Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture to keynote the apocalypse with a serene holiday in the countryside. Developed by The Chinese Room (whom also authored Dear Esther), Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture positions the player as an indistinct presence combing through the rural British town of Shropshire in June of 1984. Humanity seems to have vacated the planet, and all that’s left behind are inklings of terror and, well, the world exactly as we left it.
Under any lens, Shropshire and its surrounding Yaughton Valley are sights to behold. An experience demands photorealism when its central character is its environment, and The Chinese Room delivers the technical and artistic prowess to power their vision. I can smell the freshly cut grass, sense the warm heat of the endless sunshine, and feel my face against the breezy white sheets affixed to clotheslines. I briefly tried sitting extremely close to the television because I really wanted to play Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture in some approximation of VR (which was stupid), but, from any distance, the game perfectly exhibits a warm summer day along the countryside.
I can’t imagine the sort of design work that had to go into making the Yaughton Valley feel so real. Houses are laid out not in identical grids, but oddly spaced with respect to comfortable distances. A community area out on the edge, a church high on a hill, and a playground in the center, all interspersed with rows of houses, define a casually realistic setting. Later, when the game opens up to spacious farmland, clever campgrounds, and brief pockets of natural isolation, there’s always an astute attention to detail. Certain assets like steaming grills, children’s toys, and car engines make some curious repeat appearances, but they do little to harm believability. More so than almost any other game out there, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture sells the illusion of lived-in reality.
Reality is important when Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture presses its fiction. Sentient balls of light represent the bulk of potential interaction and the primary force of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’s plot. They can be used as a guidance mechanism, leading the player the “essential” story beats, or vague hints to send them off the beaten path into similar but ancillary sequences. In either case, they push the player toward temporary reenactments of crucial periods in the days (and in some cases weeks) leading up to the rapture. Interaction isn’t permitted; you’re just there to witness dialogue exchanges between the residents of Shropshire.
Delivery of narrative is an enigma. It’s usually not linear, which is fine, and not all of it is crucial to the main plot, which is also fine. The problem is it’s incredibly easy to miss out on chances to assemble the haphazard puzzle that tells the story of Shropshire. With the possible exception of the end sequence, you’re free to go anywhere in Shropshire any time you’d like. A highly energetic ball of light tries to keep you on course, but I freely ignored it most of the time because I was worried I’d miss something else off to the side. In my effort to canvas everything, ironically, I missed out on significant plotlines of two key characters.
I only realized this because I played Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture twice. On round two, with a better idea of how the game was intended to flow, I had a much better grip on its intentions. While the final sequences are left for its central characters, early sections are spent magnifying secondary players. I didn’t know there were triggered “end” sequences for these people until I stumbled onto one seemingly at random. I didn’t know I had to witness a series of scenes before I could trigger and end scene, as Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture never explicitly stated such.
This is kind of cool and this is kind of annoying. I’m a huge proponent of figuring things out for on my own, and I’d react unkind to the idea of using a guide in Dark Souls or looking up survival strategies for Don’t Starve. I think communicating ideas to the player via seeing and doing is more valuable than walls of text and tutorials, and yet I played Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture for like two hours without any clear idea of what I was doing. I was following attractive balls of light and witnessing drama and tension between outlines of indistinguishable people, all while trying to unravel the mystery of what had happened in Shropshire.
This isn’t a failure of the voice cast, all of whom lend great credence to characters we never actually get to see. Stephen’s manic frustration with his circumstances is widely apparent, and Jeremy’s role as Shropshire’s minister carries palpable sequences of conflict and forgiveness. Seeing panic overcome Barbara, or responsibility paralyze Diana comes with all the drama and consequence you’d find in similar works of fiction. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’s tales are all contained in loosely connected stories, but they all find some sort of resolution on the path to the end. As long as you know who’s talking—ProTip: turn subtitles on to do this more effectively—Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’s A and B stories deliver on the promise implied through their containing world.
There’s something tangibly more valuable to a second play-through. By the end of round one I knew what happened in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’s declarative mystery, but I wasn’t filled-in on its supporting cast. With a better understanding of the game’s intended flow, I was less hesitant to scour inside houses, out in the middle of fields, inside dank garages, and other nooks and crannies for additional story bits. Ringing phones and blaring radios are primed to deliver monologues from afflicted residents, with the latter being somewhat more crucial to the plot than the former. Either way, finding even more of them painted a better picture of the whole story.
The speed at which you move may cause friction. Your character (which, while having footsteps, I’m not prepared to call it human, or even physical) moves at a lethargic pace, even with the barely noticeable run button held down. In a way this makes sense; Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is almost a meditative experience, and stopping to smell the roses is half the point of the game. In other ways, specifically when you’ve walked alongside a long fence to a dead end for no reason, or figured out that you missed an entire story sequence and would like to backtrack half the map, it’s an enormous trial of patience. This is a problem to which there is no clear solution, although I’d wager The Chinese Room fell on the right side of the decision. I would have missed quite a bit if I was Usain Bolt’ing it around the place, and the idea of running goes against its philosophy. Why hurry?
There are times when Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is executing its ideas perfectly and there are times when Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture ideas feel like a solution in search of a problem. A world absent of life is engaging fiction, and when Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture sparks the player’s mind to question the nature of its reality, it’s at the top of its game. The way the light changes in the sky, the manifestations of former lives, and the calm nature of Yaughton Valley call to mind the gentle hysteria that fueled Melancholia (albeit without von Trier’s psychotic overtones). On the other hand, the proper rate at which these details are absorbed is called into question. I didn’t get it until I knew how to play it, but at that point I already unwrapped the crucial part of the mystery. At the same time, a completely straightforward path would have surely been a negative experience.
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture feels compromised. I love its calamitous tranquility, I identify with the plights of its characters, and I’m enamored with its confident storytelling, but its reluctance to disclose its disposition adversely affects its capability. I wasn’t looking for the next step in interactive fiction, but I was expecting Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture to strike a better balance between the freedom of discovery and harmony of composition.
