Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

The definition of what constitutes a game has been stretched and twisted no end over the last few years.

Released last year to critical acclaim The Chinese Room's atmospheric, sci-fi wandering game Everybody Has Gone To The Rapture caused a debate on what constitutes a "Game", a discussion that continues today. But with more than a year since release, and finding new players due to it being one of Playstation Plus's November games, is it still as impressive?

Enraptured.

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture is an amazing example of what you can do when you have a great concept and give players the room to let their imagination run wild. Offering a rich atmosphere and meaty philosophical concepts that’ll leave your mind reeling, Rapture paints a different kind of doomsday to all preceding incarnations.

There are still bed sheets hanging on the clotheslines in the deserted streets of Shropshire. They sway lightly in the wind; the ethereal vestiges of a place that once was. In many ways, they're the perfect analogy for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, an experience which is astoundingly gorgeous in a subtle, unassuming, and overwhelmingly sad way. This is a game which feels unlike anything else that you've ever played, one which will masterfully wrap you up in its gentle and heartbreaking world, and one that you won't be able to stop thinking about for days after its completion.

[Editor's Note: In light of the new information about the hidden sprint feature, we've taken the unusual step of raising Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's score from an 8 to an 8.5, in order to bring it in line with the revised text. This is not to suggest that sprinting is worth .5 points (scores are not math, and there are no set additions or subtractions for any given feature or bug) but a reflection of the reviewer's opinion of this game in the factually accurate state in which it existed at the time of review.]

Beautiful and intriguing, frustrating and flawed, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is nevertheless still worthy of your time.

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Coming from the developers of Dear Esther I was expecting more of an interactive adventure than anything. However, having played games of this same genre I can say that throughout the entire experience Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture feels less like a game than the creepy interactive story Gone Home which was released by The Fullbright Company in 2013. Fans of slower-paced story games will enjoy it, but others may very well lose their patience.

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture really tried to be something more powerful than a video game. It tried to be art. However, instead of becoming a Mona Lisa, it felt as though the paint was still awaiting its first brush stroke. It never quite got there, but if it ever achieved that first stroke, it was bound to be brilliant.

The spiritual successor to Dear Esther transcends the original in every way.

For as much as the game's setting is beautiful, living alone in its empty world feels very bleak. If the story went on any longer than a handful of hours, it might be too depressing to handle for some gamers, but the short campaign seems the perfect amount of time to visit this world. The game also splits the story up into a a handful of different stories with different characters (that feel a bit like unique acts) to help serialize the narrative. There are no progress bars, maps, or compass; so settle in for a real mystery when you boot this one up.