Everybody's Gone To The Rapture (PS4)

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This is quite possibly the most unique concept I've ever heard of for a game. Click on the link and check out this short teaser...

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture - E3 Trailer - High quality stream - Gamersyde

E3 2014: PS4’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture Reemerges, Impresses


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When they say everybody, they aren’t kidding.



By Colin MoriartyLast year at Gamescom, Sony announced a new PlayStation 4-exclusive called Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Under development not at a Sony-owned studio, but at an indie developer called The Chinese Room, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture scurried from the spotlight just as quickly as it entered it, leaving little more than a few morsels of information, some screenshots, and a brief trailer in its wake.

Frankly, I’d all but forgotten about it, placing it into the back of my mind until it inevitably reemerged. So when I browsed my E3 schedule and saw that one of the behind-closed-doors sessions I’d have with Sony was for this mysterious game, I was excited to see what it was all about. As its name suggests, it’s about the end of the world -- the Rapture has significance in Christian apocalyptic theology -- but after seeing an extended demo of the game, I love how it isn’t heavy-handed and overt in its portrayal of the end-times. It’s hard to look anywhere in the industry without finding a dozen dystopian, post-apocalyptic games at any given time. Thankfully, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is different.



The Chinese Room made its bones working on Half-Life 2 mods, most notably Dear Esther, a thoughtful and artistic game that we loved. While working on another PC game, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, this UK-based developer decided to pivot an idea it was concurrently creating – Rapture – to console. With the help of Sony Santa Monica, The Chinese Room has toiled away on the project as its team size has ballooned, crafting an eerie title that likely won’t be ready until 2015.




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…[Everybody's Going to the Rapture is] designed to tell a story that’s simply not possible in film, television, or books.

The beauty of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, according to one of the devs working on the game, is that it’s designed to tell a story that’s simply not possible in film, television, or books. It’s crafted in such a way as to let the player take it on as he or she wants, with no guiding hand, no campaign, and no attempt to funnel you in a specific direction. There’s stuff to see and do everywhere, but you don’t have to see and do all of it, or even most of it. This is, ultimately, the epitome of non-linear, and it’s up to the player to decide what to do and how to do it.

Considering The Chinese Room’s pedigree creating FPS mods, it’s no surprise that Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a first-person game. As the demo started, our character – who is nameless and voiceless, at least in the portion we got to take a look at – finds him or herself in the pastoral UK countryside in the year 1984. It’s a scene ripped straight out of a gorgeous painting. Before us lies a dirt road; to the left and right are fields of wheat, as well as bushes, trees, grass, and other flora. The sky is blue, streaked with thin white clouds and the occasional bird. In the distance are a couple of structures – an old home and a shed – and that’s pretty much it.







For as much plant and animal life as there was, there’s no sign of a single human; just the plentiful evidence of lives no longer lived. The idea of the Rapture in Christian theology revolves around people being taken from Earth in preparation for the end of the world as we know it; The Chinese Room confirmed that you won’t literally run into other humans in the game, but rather signs – some obvious, some less so – of their respective, and now extinguished, existence. Whether or not there’s a religious connotation to everything remains to be seen; what I do know is that it’s up to the player to put the pieces of the puzzle together, an interesting concept indeed, since it won’t be entirely clear to the player what the puzzle even is.




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There’s no HUD, no text, no tutorial, and not even a centered reticle.

I noticed instantly that Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture contains no on-screen clutter, a testament to the style of game The Chinese Room is attempting to make. There’s no HUD, no text, no tutorial, and not even a centered reticle. When you interact with something – open a car’s trunk, push a door ajar, turn on a static-ridden television – you do so because you think you can, not because the game tells you to. You really are on your own. This feeling of loneliness is heightened by reliance on randomly-generated ambient noise that makes every walk through the woods or into a house sound different.

On the dirt road ahead of the starting point, and slightly to the right, is a red telephone booth, the type you’d see in England. There’s some chatter on the phone, but it’s brief, and you’re again left in quiet surroundings. What to do next? Not surprisingly, there’s no right answer. Electronic devices in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture represent all that’s left of the literal human image and voice; radios can be tinkered with to catch phantom signals, televisions can be switched on to capture a fleeting glimpse of someone or something. This being the ‘80s, there are no cell phones and no Internet. This, as it turns out, is entirely by design, to bring players back to a simpler time, but also a time of greater horror (think the end of the Cold War and a landscape rife with threats of nuclear war). It’s, as The Chinese Room devs describe it, “Cozy Catastrophe Fiction.”







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Gamescom: Everyone's Gone to Rapture Teaser
What’s quite noticeable is an orange light floating around the beautiful country landscape, darting about like a rogue comet. This, as it so happens, is one of only five AI-controlled “characters” in the entire game, and it’s unclear if it’s trying to tell you anything, or if it’s simply there as some sort of companion. As we moved closer to the home on the other end of the dirt road, this orange light persisted, but never pestered. The simple act of being in this environment – in this strangely quiet, eerie, beautiful place – is supposed to “inspire” the player “to engage with the story,” regardless of even a hint of outside prodding.




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The simple act of being in this environment – in this strangely quiet, eerie, beautiful place – is supposed to 'inspire' the player 'to engage with the story'…

One of the things I really enjoyed hearing about was the idea that the order in which you undertake Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’s non-linear story will add or subtract context to other aspects of the story. That is to say, if you see something about a specific person, and that something seems bad, it might actually not be as bad as it seems. But without added context found elsewhere in the adventure – or without seeing things in a certain order – different gamers are going to get different things out of what is otherwise the same experience. Everything is wholly decided by the player – including how the story itself is interpreted – and it’s all affected by what you see, how you see it, and what you choose to do and not to do.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture has catapulted up my list of most-anticipated games, from an afterthought once pondered during its reveal in Germany to a promising game that continues the PlayStation brand’s attempt to dominate the emotional, abstract, artistic console games space. At only three hours long or so, Rapture doesn’t promise to keep you busy for long. It’s only promise, it appears, is to allow you to explore its world at your own pace and in your own time.

Everyone around you seems to have died in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, but you can’t. There’s no way to fail. “The only fail state,” the dev giving the demo explained, “is if the player doesn’t care.” If my look at the game is any indication, there’s little danger of that.