A translated review

[Smithfield]

Everybody's gone to the rapture

Narrative-centric, it matters.

Have people of the world been ravished, pursuing their life beneath clouds and rainbows? Not really, no.
You find yourself in an idyllic valley, a tiny village, the British countryside... a perfect postcard from the eighties. Abandoned? Or forsaken by others? You are the last human soul in a frozen community - or nearly...

Like many narrative-centric experiences, you’re not there to actually live the story, no. It's already happened. Your only tacit task is to recover, one fragment at a time, the course of events that took place before you ‘existed’. Get to know the environment and rebuild as best as gameplay allows, the genuine lore. And that’s where the game lies: “rebuilding”. Playful!

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (EGtR) is close to Dear Esther with similar crippling flaws, regarding certain players: walk only, no jump, no sprint, no visual clues of your actual body (and shadow). Some can’t bare those, and it’s quite understandable. What’s left for the player to do? Understand, linger... a game for the contemplative ones, clearly. Rapture provides an exquisite delicacy for the eye, an opportunity to (re)discover the simple joy of admiring visuals of great consistency - a generation of gamers has spent so much time trying to appreciate games for more than just their graphics... the colour palette’s harmony catalyses by the correctness of the period's objects and details.

In Rapture, the player has the responsibility to break into the memorable scenes and experiences from previous inhabitants to uncover their world. At this point, some of the scenery's elements start to naturally highlight and transform. Here the developer, Chinese Room, redefines and exposes the shade between a lost world and a world which was simply caught frozen in an everlasting instant.

Rapidly then, a noteworthy thing appears: the phenomenon responsible of recent events is unknown, described at best as liquid light flowing from another world. At the same time you start learning to fear those sparks and beams of light - just as a squirrel learns to beware of Men. What is simultaneously a threat and a splendor grow in your mind, fed by sightings and inhabitants' testimony. The ghosts of villagers shall reenact their last conversation, mentioning how it affected their health and deeply overwhelmed the whole community.

Soon those feelings shall melt with powerful grace, with a great impression of peacefulness. It’s an outstanding achievement from Chinese Room. Such a juxtaposition is rare in video games, as a deeply surreal phenomenon which strictly eludes any attempt of rational break-down.

Fragments of actual information reach you across conversation flashbacks, inhabitants trying to deal with the light shortly before they vanished. As all of them seem terrified of the cataclysm they know for sure is coming, the player becomes an antenna, catching one of those radio waves emitted from earth to the cosmos which will travel forever and propagate their echoes in the void of space. Soon you will feel that you are made of that void.

The voice acting, one of the best for its purpose, keeps a dramatic intensity that is not overacted. There's a lot of voiceover to hear as you explore distant areas, and it never becomes a permanent annoying background noise.

If EGtR gathers many brilliant qualities, smaller troubles still exist - the known issues of that genre obviously, but not only. The lack of grip over the world; like if a whole experience was lying under the title and you only get to hold a limited subset of that whole, as well as an impression of emptiness as you watch a specific scene. Furthermore, that the small village also appears to have a fixed map to hold the player and ensure he’s not getting too far away from the core location. Such invisible walls are rare in comparison to other, but they remain one the most unsightly means to design an experience and control gameplay. Don’t get me wrong, it’s close to an open world, miles away from Dear Esther’s paths and trails, so open that in the end, frustration can appear whenever you have to back-track or reinspect an already visited place… it can prevent the exploration from being as rewarding as it was meant to be.

In conclusion, I'm grateful that this former PS4 exclusive has finally made its way to PC. I appraise the contemplative and thoughtful, 'walking to discover' process. Overall the experience does leave you, the player, emotionally overwhelmed, through powerful scenes and events. Choose wisely, if you feel like giving Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture a chance, as many of its genre, it requires your involvement, some sort of dedication, and you’ll be from far, less passive than you may expect to be.

The above text is a translation from French to English. In the context of set of Artistic Screenshots she published on PC Gamer, 2016 the 12th of May . Translated by Smithfield and by Meep: thanks again for your assistance.