There are trails you can follow through the game, and The Chinese Room has been extremely clever about how these work. It’s not that one player will have an entirely different experience of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture than another, but each experience will feel different and give you different information and a different slant on the story, even as each leads to the same conclusion.
Others only trigger once you’ve triggered other sequences, and here the way and order that you do things seems – and it’s hard to be sure exactly what’s going on here – crucial. Some you can find in any order, just through wandering the Yaughton valley. This is a story-led game in the style of The Chinese Room’s earlier Dear Esther or Fullbright’s Gone Home, but it’s one where you put the story together piece by piece, finding snippets in mysteriously persistent phone calls and radio broadcasts, or in reconstructed scenes played out by spectres formed from glowing trails of light. That doesn’t mean that either is predictable or linear. In any case, we’ll keep things as spoiler-free as humanly possible because, in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the game and the narrative are indistinguishable from each other. The smartest thing you could do right now is purchase and download the game, play it, then come back and read the rest. By taking inspiration from a very British vein of sci-fi, and most specifically the fifties novels of John Wyndham, the team at The Chinese Room have created a post-apocalyptic game unlike any other, as locked into a place and era as Kubrick’s 2001, the Quatermass movies or Tarkovsky’s films of Solaris and Stalker.įrankly, the less you know going in, the better.
There may be odd signs that not everything is right, but this is an apocalypse where the victims appear to have quietly disappeared, leaving a radio blaring in the garden, doors unlocked, a van left open on the side of the road. It’s a very English kind of apocalypse one that takes place without much fuss or obvious violence or screaming in a quiet Shropshire valley in the mid-1980s.
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