Sony Computer Entertainment and The Chinese Room send us their hit Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. It is not easy to say, what kind of game it is because it does not fit to the usually occurring games, but this is what we like about. This game, let’s call it adventure, comes close to The Chinese Room’s previous game Dear Esther. In both, players running through virtual worlds and have to solve lyrical puzzles but in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture you have an complete open world to explore. This game takes you for four up to six hours into a magical world.
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Let us briefly discuss the game’s story. The game begins in a place called Shropshire in England. This is a small village in which you can find cute houses with gardens, some cornstalks swaying in the wind, and you can hear the sound of a beautiful creek near to you. All in all, a pretty, lovely, idyllic scenery. At the beginning everything seems fine, but after a closer look you will find out that something terrible must have happened, because all dwellers are gone. You start to ask yourself, what happened to this people? Why are all these dead birds lying on the ground and where all these bloodstains come from? Your job is to seek for the answers.
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What we love is that the developers use a simple but effective tool in this game. While you are searching for answers, you only catch a few details about the story. The developers found the right balance between ‘What does that mean?’ and ‘I want to know more!’ That means, that the story’s details you find don’t match together at the first moment but are enough that you do not want to put the controller away.
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NO NO NO! We want to stop at this point. It could happen that we tell you too much about the game’s story at this moment. You know our rule: “NO SPOILERS IN REVIEWS”! And that is the reason we go on with the next topic. We do not want to destroy your faszination about Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture before you played it by yourself.
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What we also love about this game is that Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’s play-mechanics are really simple or, let’s call it ‘minimalist.’ The only things you can do is to look around, run through the game’s world and to check out some objects like phones or radios, which actually means that you can start and stop the audio logs of this objects.
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In addition to that, the game supports the movement sensor of the PlayStation 4’s controllers. From time to time you find glowing spheres which are floating through the air. It also happens once in awhile that this spheres starts to dance in front of your nose or simply disappear. Most of the time this spheres show us the way to the next fragment of the story. If this happens they transform their self into ghostly silhouettes of the former residents which tells us in short flashbacks, ‘What the hell happened here!’
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Now and then players have also to activate this scenes by tending the controller in the right angle. It is like you would search for a right frequenz on an old radio. We love it, that the motion-controllers itself works perfectly in this game. It could be very frustrating, if not.
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Unfortunately, there is also the other side of the coin. The big question is, where to find the next part of the plot. It could be very frustrating to find the right way in the world of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The thing is, that there is nothing to do between the hotspots. In addition to that, it could happen that you walk by potential flashback-locations if you do not pay enough attention. It is possible to visit a spot more than one time but the protagonist do not walk or ran so fast as in other games. On the other hand, this is not so bad as it sounds. We noticed that the developers want that we enjoy the game’s great atmosphere as long as we play.
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Yes, the game’s atmosphere is marvelous. This works with the help of great graphics and stylish sound effects. Most of the time you only hear your footsteps, the wind or a noise of an anomaly but the sound changes in dramatic situations in which you can hear impressive choir and string music.
We also love the varied and pictorial scenes. After we finished the game we start to miss the beauty of Shropshire. The game looks beautiful, not only because of the high graphics but also of the many details.
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What we can say is, that we like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. It’s a great diversion between all this explosions and shootings known from other games. We like the simple mechanics and that the game’s story is more important than frustrating controller shortcuts. We love the graphical style and game’s setting but we would prefer if the game’s world would be more linear. We love to explore the village by our own, but on the other hand we missed something that could help us to find the right way much faster.
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We like the game’s mysterious story and that the game is not about Zombies or something like that. We think that players will enjoy a great and atmospheric journey. This ‘Adventure’, with his great puzzles/enigmas fascinated us for hours. We definitely can recommend Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture to you.
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