Everybody's Gone to the Rapture Preview - E3 2015

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, or "Beginner's Introduction to Frenetic Spanish" as it would come to be known during my playthrough. Developed exclusively for the PlayStation 4 from the studio behind Dear Esther, The Chinese Room have once again chosen the fractious route of experimental storytelling. I say fractious because I believe the game is like Marmite - you'll either love it or hate it.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (let's call it EGTTR from now on) transports the player to the fleeting moments before an apocalypse to explore the choices people make when faced with an impending disaster.

Well, this is the English countryside in 1984. Being from Britain and having driven through and visited idyllic little slices of said countryside often, people, by their nature, may not care too much for the outside world. These communities can be very insular, some actively shunning and remaining ignorant of life beyond their village walls. Obviously, it's different now, as it's nearly 30 years gone. However, what you'll also discover is that these communities are usually very close knit. Meaning that as a small Petri dish of society that explores a community, the countryside is a good control group.

That keen British insight and social commentary aside, EGTTR claims to present "impressively realized landscapes". The first shot of the village after the intro voice over (which was in Spanish before I changed it in the settings) was bright and florid. However, once I started walking around the village, I noticed that this could have been released on last-gen consoles without too much loss to graphical integrity. Perhaps that's just because the PS4 is somewhat untested technology for these developers. Personally, I don't care about the graphics - it's a narrative driven game - but don't keep pushing the graphical fidelity angle on me.

So, I started off by walking into a nearby guard house/radio station for the local astronomy centre. I immediately searched my pad for a "hurry up/sprint" button, but there was none. Well, time for a country stroll then.

There's only one button in EGTTR and it's used to contextually interact with the environment. I listened to a radio broadcast, which told me of a law concerning something astronomical that had been recently passed (in the 1980s). The game's story is delivered through radios, cassette players - recording devices - as well as glowing orbs of light. To interact with these orbs, you have to "tune" your PS4 pad side-to-side like driving an old timey car from the "talkies".

As I sauntered through toward the village, I gleaned information about the people possibly responsible for something experimentally sinister concerning the village and its astronomy tower. There's also the village's take on the events leading up to the titular rapture. The fragmented delivery of information puts you in the disembodied role of detective as you attempt to piece together what exactly happened.

As the developers said, this style of story is strongly reminiscent of older British sci-fi. Straight away, it reminded me of those cassette tapes I would rent from the library with audio stories. In that sense, it's very authentic. The dialogue and stories, from concerned denizens to news stories to general reflections, are nicely realized. The village looks and feels like, well, a village from the 1980s.

I found several orbs on my trip: they whisk through the village, directing you to several areas and locations. I learned that an old woman wasn't happy the army closed off the road. I saw evidence that something bloody occurred at the doctors, then the dialogue flipped to Spanish for some reason. My lesson in Spanish also extended to a village meeting, but I gathered there was a fete of some sort about to happen before everywhere vanished. There are many of these points everywhere; you just have to look.

EGTTR is open world, but I felt like that was a bit of stretch. This hub of a village is not entirely explorable: fences block your path, doors don't open - you can't just wander off. One of my other issues (not just with the game but with open world in general) is figuring out what adds to the story or game when I can walk into a building of no value. It's difficult to make every location have some merit. When I've wandered through a house and gotten nothing from it aside from knowing that people left in a hurry, I, personally, don't see the point. I know it adds atmosphere but I just didn't care.

To add to this, I know that EGTTR is a narrative, story-driven experience. I know the developers want me to drink it in slowly, but when I looked around and knew I couldn't run anywhere - only walk - my first instinct was dread. Forget the end of the world, I can't even sprint.

The bottom line is that EGTTR was not created for me; it's for people who thoroughly enjoyed Dear Esther and games in that vein. If you're a fan of piecing together a story, learning about diverse characters, their motivations and life, you'll get a kick out of it. It's not that I don't enjoy a good story, I certainly do, just not in this particular delivery. I'm sure that fans of The Chinese Room's previous effort will find Everybody's Gone to the Rapture a very touching and worthwhile trip.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture will be a PlayStation 4 exclusive, available on August 11, 2015.