Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture Review
Released in 2015, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is an interactive, first-person exploration video game that was developed by a collaboration between The Chinese Room and SCE Santa Monica Studio and published by Sony Computer Entertainment.
The game was first released for PS4 in August 2015, and then for Microsoft Windows in April 2016.
Plot and setting
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is set in the year 1984, in a fictional town named Yaughton in Shropshire, England. The game is story-driven, and as you progress deeper into the game, more information is revealed, and you gain a better understanding of the story.
The town of Yaughton is completely deserted with no humans or animals to be found anywhere. The character or force or entity that you play has to explore the beautiful, empty town and uncover the truth of why, how, and where everyone has disappeared to. We say character/force/entity because we don’t actually know who or what the played character is as there is no indication throughout the entirety of the game. The game is first-person, and we don’t see any feet or hands.
Mysterious and alluring orbs of light float around the air and guide you to areas of the town where scenes of past events in the town are re-enacted by other human-shaped lights. As you follow these scenes around the town, you gain more information and clues to figure out what happened to the inhabitants of the town. You also find telephones and radios that replay old conversations, recordings, and broadcasts, all of which lead you to put the puzzle pieces together to understand that it was “the rapture” that made the town of Yaughton completely empty and lifeless.
Gameplay
As a single-player, first-person exploration game that is also often described as a walking simulator, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture has very little gameplay. Apart from walking around the town, exploring the richly-detailed, beautiful world, and interacting with different objects such as doors, telephones, radios, and so on, there really isn’t much you can do.
You are reeled in by the heart-wrenching and captivating story, the excellent writing, and to be honest, it is your curiosity that drives you to keep exploring and get to the bottom of what happened in the town. The floating orbs of light serve as a guide to your adventure, subtly hinting where you have to look next to solve the mystery.
Even though Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is not a horror video game, it is shrouded with mystery, suspense, and a feeling of uneasiness from start to finish. Besides, the writing is so impressive and emotionally moving that it can make you think hard about loss and human connection.
There are five areas in the game, and each area revolves around a different character. The main protagonists (different from the played character) are a scientist couple working at the observatory – Dr. Katherine “Kate” Collins and her husband, Stephen Appleton.
It is revealed through the scene re-enactments and old telephone conservations and recordings that during their work, the couple encountered a strange pattern of lights that appeared in the night sky. They believed this to be an unknown life form and continued to observe it, and to their horror, discovered that the pattern was infecting and sometimes, even killing the animals in the town like the bords and cows, until eventually, it spread to humans.
While Kate believes that the pattern is unaware of the harm it is causing to other lifeforms and is simply trying to communicate with humans, Stephen believes differently. He is convinced that the pattern is a threat and is a deadly force that can eliminate the human race.
While Kate locks herself up in the observatory, working to find a way to communicate with the pattern, Stephen tries to warn the local government and keep the people of the town protected from the pattern and its deadly effects. The inhabitants are told that they are being quarantined because of the Spanish flu, but they become increasingly suspicious as people, as well as corpses, start to disappear in thin air, leaving behind specks of light. The quarantine fails, and the pattern spreads outside of the town of Yaughton to the rest of the planet.
As the mystery of the game continues evolving, the rest of the story unfurls beautifully, albeit very slowly. In fact, the slow pace of the game is a common complaint of those who have played it, but Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a game that definitely rewards you for your patience.
