Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
Apr. 17th, 2024 07:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingEverybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a first-person walking sim set in the fictional village of Yaughton in the west of England. Yaughton is completely deserted, and the player’s job is to figure out what happened. “What happened” turns out to be a combination of things, none of which is ever properly explained, but what really matters is the human drama at the core of the crisis.
The game is entirely first-person, and the player can only do two things: walk and look around. There's also an action button that can be used to turn on radios, pick up ringing phones, and enter open doors and gates, but we never see the player character's hands. The player is thus little more than a moving point of view. This is just fine, because Yaughton is gorgeous.
After climbing down from the hill where the game starts, the player is confronted with a jumble of buildings and several intersections. Since you can go into almost every house, not to mention every house's backyard and garage and garden shed, it was difficult for me to resist the temptation to do so. I kept encountering radios that can be turned on to get a bit of story, as well as shimmers of light that resolved into stylized representations of people sharing brief conversations.
Despite the lovely scenery, the first bit of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is fairly stagnant. The front end of the game is loaded with tons of disconnected characters whose relationship to each other isn't immediately apparent. The light shining on the world is totally flat, and there’s no wind moving the leaves in the trees or blowing garbage across the streets.
After almost two hours of wandering around and trying to figure things out, I stopped caring about finding everything and decided to follow the glowing comet of light that’s intended to lead you through the story. What the guiding comet reveals is a series of conversations centered around a priest, Father Jeremy Wheeler, who was trying to come to terms with his faith in relation to what was happening to the town. Following a climactic scene, the game changes in a significant way.
At this point, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture becomes much more structured. The player now understands that each area of the game is the stage for a narrative focused on one character. After the first major transition, the world of the game also becomes more active, with floating pollen, falling leaves, swaying flowers, billowing air-dried laundry, and the shadows of wind moving through the trees. As the natural world comes alive, the pieces of the story gradually start coming together.
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture isn’t perfect. The start of the game is extremely slow, and it’s easy to get lost at first. The guiding comet has a tendency to disappear, requiring you to restart the game to bring it back, and the slow pace of movement makes backtracking more annoying than it should be. Still, the graphics and music are beautiful – rapturous, even – and I was genuinely moved by the writing. If you’re patient enough to follow the story to its conclusion, your reward is an almost overwhelming sense of joy.
I should mention that I enjoyed Kirk Hamilton’s write-up of the plot (on Kotaku here), which poses many interesting questions and offers some excellent answers. The apocalyptic story seems much more grim and horrific when summarized in writing than it does when you’re playing the game itself, though, so I’d recommend going in without spoilers.
The game is entirely first-person, and the player can only do two things: walk and look around. There's also an action button that can be used to turn on radios, pick up ringing phones, and enter open doors and gates, but we never see the player character's hands. The player is thus little more than a moving point of view. This is just fine, because Yaughton is gorgeous.
After climbing down from the hill where the game starts, the player is confronted with a jumble of buildings and several intersections. Since you can go into almost every house, not to mention every house's backyard and garage and garden shed, it was difficult for me to resist the temptation to do so. I kept encountering radios that can be turned on to get a bit of story, as well as shimmers of light that resolved into stylized representations of people sharing brief conversations.
Despite the lovely scenery, the first bit of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is fairly stagnant. The front end of the game is loaded with tons of disconnected characters whose relationship to each other isn't immediately apparent. The light shining on the world is totally flat, and there’s no wind moving the leaves in the trees or blowing garbage across the streets.
After almost two hours of wandering around and trying to figure things out, I stopped caring about finding everything and decided to follow the glowing comet of light that’s intended to lead you through the story. What the guiding comet reveals is a series of conversations centered around a priest, Father Jeremy Wheeler, who was trying to come to terms with his faith in relation to what was happening to the town. Following a climactic scene, the game changes in a significant way.
At this point, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture becomes much more structured. The player now understands that each area of the game is the stage for a narrative focused on one character. After the first major transition, the world of the game also becomes more active, with floating pollen, falling leaves, swaying flowers, billowing air-dried laundry, and the shadows of wind moving through the trees. As the natural world comes alive, the pieces of the story gradually start coming together.
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture isn’t perfect. The start of the game is extremely slow, and it’s easy to get lost at first. The guiding comet has a tendency to disappear, requiring you to restart the game to bring it back, and the slow pace of movement makes backtracking more annoying than it should be. Still, the graphics and music are beautiful – rapturous, even – and I was genuinely moved by the writing. If you’re patient enough to follow the story to its conclusion, your reward is an almost overwhelming sense of joy.
I should mention that I enjoyed Kirk Hamilton’s write-up of the plot (on Kotaku here), which poses many interesting questions and offers some excellent answers. The apocalyptic story seems much more grim and horrific when summarized in writing than it does when you’re playing the game itself, though, so I’d recommend going in without spoilers.
