Game Review: Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (PS4, 2015)

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a ‘walking simulator’ made by The Chinese Room, the same company who made Dear Esther. It is really a story and an experience more than a game, as there isn’t much gamey to do. The only puzzle to solve is to piece together what happened in an abandoned English village to make it so abandoned.

Weird balls of light and electricity can be seen and heard buzzing around the town and when you get to certain places, shimmering shapes play out a conversation that happened there. Without distinct faces or bodies, it can be hard to figure out which of the townsfolk is talking, but the game does a fairly good job of dropping in names and sometimes jobs or other context clues to help you figure who is who. Still, I would have preferred seeing the characters more clearly, even if that would have hurt the game’s sense of isolation.

As an environment, the game is impressive. There is a lot of attention to detail and the sound design also helps to make you feel immersed in this eerily peaceful place. There are borders that keep you from leaving the town and these make sense within the story. What makes less sense is that you can’t jump. You won’t often feel the need to, but when wandering around a garden with a low fence or hedge around it, it is annoying to have to amble all the way back to where you entered.

The biggest downside to this game may sound superficial but – it really, really needs a ‘run’ button. There is way to go slightly faster – by holding down R2 on your controller – but it is still more a jog than a run. I can understand the thinking behind the lack of an option to run. The idea is to envelop yourself in the story, to go around slowly soaking in the details carefully laid out around you. But because you can miss out on pieces of the story if you don’t scour every inch of the town, you will find yourself backtracking slowly through places you have already seen. And if you miss the game’s hints of where to head next and end up in the wrong part of town, the aimless wandering will get tedious very quickly.

As a story, the game mostly satisfies, though you can end up with important gaps in the narrative if you didn’t bother to hunt down all the flashbacks. Your role as the player never becomes clear, you seem to be there simply to observe. But if a pleasant walk on a crisp, sunny day through a creepy village with a Twilight Zone story hidden inside it sounds like your kind of thing, you can’t go wrong with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.