Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
Humans often think themselves brave explorers and conquerors, immune to the ravages of time, but what happens to the stuff we leave behind—the vacant, quiet houses, the cars parked along the curb, the bars where we drank and partied, the churches where we prayed to our god—when we’re gone? Did the relationships we formed in this life—the people we called friends, our enemies, our family, the ones we stabbed in the back—even matter? These are some of the questions that sprung to mind as I played through developers The Chinese Room and SCE Santa Monica Studio’s methodical, meditative experience Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
Set in the small English village of Shropshire, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture casts you as an unseen spectator, perhaps a survivor or most likely some otherworldly presence, as you explore the empty shops and houses of people long gone. There’s an unnerving sense of dread, an unnatural stillness to the world that persists in the quietness and makes you feel ill at ease. It reminded me of the early segments of Slender when you’re walking through the woods. Being all alone with just the sound of the wind blowing and birds chirping is disconcerting in an uncanny valley sense—the setting feels familiar, but something about it makes you uncomfortable
All of the residents in Shropshire have vanished. It instantly becomes obvious that they were quarantined inside the village—military vehicles and gates block all the outbound roads. The radios and phones repeat a sequence of numbers, static, and messages left behind by a scientist attempting to isolate a pattern in some unknown event. Journeying through the town, you’ll come across pulsating orbs of light. These orbs trigger short scenes, echoes of whatever apocalyptic tragedy befell the town, in which the former residents reanimate as figures of light reliving their lives like ghosts. Most of these segments are optional and are played out of order depending on how you find them. Each adds to the character development of the town and instills a growing sense of despair and something amiss. A mother sits on the couch crying because her husband and children, suffering from some strange illness, went upstairs and never came back down. Another character frantically calls out in fear. All these scenes end without resolution, leaving you to guess and ponder what happened.
From its opening moments, it is obvious Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture isn’t a game in the traditional sense, and its slow and tranquil gameplay might bore those looking for a fast-paced, heart-pounding experience. There’s not much game to this game besides wandering. The game plays as more of a hybrid experience, like an interactive tour, in the grey area between cinema and gaming. The slowness can make it a slog sometimes, especially when exploring the town. You can run by pressing the right bottom trigger, but the movement still feels slow even at max speed. This makes backpedaling to previous locations somewhat a chore, which is a shame in a game where exploration is the main point.
Another flaw I found is that only some of the houses are open to explore, with others little more than cookie-cutter decoration. Perhaps the developers didn’t have the time or resources to make every house interactive, or maybe Shropshire just has a lot of vacant houses, but with the game focusing so much on human interaction, it made me wonder why these families’ stories weren’t worth telling. Outside of the light segments and radios, I found little visual clues to fill in the story of who these people were. It’s the old adage: show, don’t tell. Like the aforementioned scene with the mother and her children—wouldn’t it be cool to be able to go upstairs and try to piece together what happened to them? Well, too bad, because the door to the room is locked, and you can’t open it. I just wish more of the story could have been told through details and exploration rather than what amounts to cutscenes.
What’s frustratingly profound about Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is that there are moments in the game that are genius and resonate with fear and sadness, like listening to a character tell another character that everyone is gone or a town meeting where residents try to handle the problem themselves. The premise of the game throws a nice spin on the usual apocalyptic setting and ponders some deep questions. If only it was more interactive, if only the world was more fully realized through its minute details, then Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture could have been truly great.
