My hot take on the new exploration game Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture: It is ultra super good-looking.
I picked up The Chinese Room’s latest game (currently only available on PS4) last night on the recommendation of our critic-at-large Chris Suellentrop, who liked it. I’m still early in the game and don’t yet know why, or even if, Everybody Went To The Rapture. But I can say for certain that this game looks very nice.
I’ve been capturing some clips that mostly amount to “me walking up to a thing and then standing still.” You don’t do that much in this game, you mostly just walk around an English country town, explore, and listen to talking balls of light as they shed… er, light on what happened and why no one’s around.
But if the point of a game is to walk around and take in the sights, would that more games could feature sights this lovely.
For all its tranquil arboreal splendor, Rapture also does a good job of depicting weird etheric light bouncing off of everyday foyers:
As for the game itself: I’m digging it so far, but I do particularly enjoy this kind of “Mysterious EVENT leads to empty town/woman is reading cryptic numbers on the radio/what the hell happened here?” kinda deal.
I also like games that capture even a fleeting digital glimpse of nature’s beauty, though in Rapture‘s case that beauty is coloured by emptiness and an ominous, quiet doom. (I’ll have a more complete notion of the game once I’m finished, of course.)
And to people who might complain that Rapture is just a “walking simulator” with no meaningful interactions, I present the following:
Comments
10 responses to “Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture Is A Reeeeally Pretty Game”
God damm developers and their gating of content.
Gated?
Not much to do but a lot to see and explore. The challenge afterwords is trying to make as much sense of the mystery as you can.
Looks like Dear Esther 2…..What I mean by that is, it’s just a shitty walking simulator with great music by Jessica Curry and not really anything else.
The music is really good (and appropriate to the quasi-religious mystery of the game) but what really takes the cake for me is the atmospheric sound effects. Go to locations and you’ll get the odd faint snatch of sound, whether it’s kids at a park, people drinking at a pub etc. This game is so damned creepy and really captures the feeling that this is a town where everyone has disappeared only moments before. When I’m walking around I keep on expecting jump scares, I’m so tense.
The story it’s piecing together is very absorbing, but whoever decided to use motion controls to trigger cut scenes should be forced to play Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor with a Kinect for forty hours until they learn better.
I’ve found at least three places where I couldn’t trigger a scene by rocking the PS4 controller; two of those seem to be critical (one is in a train station, the other in a meeting hall). The little glowing ball of light that guides you around refuses to move until the scenes are triggered, which leaves me more or less stuck.
There’s a note in the manual that when this happens it means you’ve missed something, but no indication as to how to find that something (on a huge map, at a forced pace of a slow walk). Remembering that your floaty ball of light guide is refusing to move from a parking spot next to the scene-that-won’t-trigger.
It’s tremendously frustrating, and knocks the game down from a solid 4/5 IMO to something more like 2.5/5.
I went old school and ignored the ball of light from the very beginning, the equivalent of walking left on a side-scroller 🙂 I did get one situation at a pond where I couldn’t trigger the cut-scene, but I just kept exploring and came back to it later. I assumed it was because I hadn’t seen a pre-requisite scene or something. I tend to hold down R2 when traversing the outside as you accelerate up to about twice as fast as your normal walking speed (which I agree is slow).
Anyone else see a kind of invisible creature bending light as it ran away in that first .gif when you get close to the painting?
No, but I did when I looked again lol.
Def some kind of distortion , couldn’t make out any shape though
Nothing says “Really pretty game” better than a barely animated 256 colour gif (Header image). Why not just post a 16 million colour static image? At least Kotaku are starting to use the webm format now though and not destroying my quota.
On topic, it does look really nice and I’m kind of curious about the game, but I just can’t muster enthusiasm for what we now call walking simulators. I still haven’t even played Dear Esther or Gone Home despite having bought them on sale years ago.