Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture - Review

For a span of five hours, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture transported me to one of the most detailed, fully realized worlds I’ve ever experienced in a video game. It builds a potent sense of place, populates it with rich characters, and delivers a fantastic mystery that culminates in a powerful payoff. It’s a wonderful way to experience a story, though Developer The Chinese Room is overzealous in making sure we take in all the atmosphere and story by slowing movement speed to a rate that seems to actively disrespect our time and patience. From the beginning, Rapture utilizes a slew of effective storytelling techniques to get across its intriguing and affecting tale of a quiet English village whose inhabitants suddenly begin to disappear into swirls of light. Well-written audio diaries, fantastic character interactions, and environmental storytelling clues all come together to build a great, mysterious tale. Tiny details litter the environment that help add depth to the characters, world, and story: a pair of crutches lay abandoned outside a church, a picnic sits half-eaten on a hillside, and tennis rackets lay strewn about a court as if abandoned mid-game. I felt compelled to explore every nook and cranny, as doing so almost always added another piece to Rapture’s impressive, mysterious puzzle.

I really loved how my theories regarding the mystery kept evolving throughout my playthrough -- I continually oscillated between hypothesizing that the events were rooted in religious, alien, or human-caused reasons. It felt just as great when a turn of events proved me wrong as it did when one proved me right.

Rapture’s cast enters and exits the story in the same way characters do in a skillfully directed ensemble movie. I really appreciated the way it trusted me to find bits and pieces of a person’s life out of order, and figure out how they all fit together without holding my hand. Throughout the five hours I was introduced to six major characters, each of whom have really interesting backstories that felt great to slowly gain an understanding of. Discovering the arc of how a God-fearing priest comes to terms with his creator in the face of such unexplainable events, or how a lone American, thousands of miles away from home, dealt with being an outsider in this quaint village led to some really powerful, memorable character moments. Piecing together how each major player deals with the events of Rapture provides a complex and rewarding portrait.

All of this is heightened by a fantastic score that punctuates the bigger moments with booming, hymnal music, which in a world completely devoid of human life, ends up taking on a life of its own. Haunting ambient noises that almost come across as the voices of those who vanished in the event pepper the world, reminding you that this place wasn’t always so empty. Likewise, there’s some really smart sound design at play that subtly guides you toward points of interest.

Actual game mechanics are about at sparse as they come -- aside from moving around the world playing “collect the scattered objects,” the only means of interaction in Rapture are a single button that opens doors and turns on radios, and some slightly obtuse tilt functionality. The world is littered with floating balls of light that unfold into short vignettes that show you a brief moment from before the apocalyptic event occurred; in order to activate the more important ones, you have to tilt the DualShock 4 and find the right frequency of the light, as if you’re tuning a radio. Rapture doesn’t do a great job of cluing you in on what to do in these situations, and it took me a few hours to actually wrap my head around this form of interaction. In a tight experience where everything else felt necessary, these tilt moments felt a bit shoehorned in.

Exploration is the real gameplay, and so it’s valuable that this world is open right from the start. If you want, you could rush straight towards the finale and reach the conclusion without piecing together its story. Well, maybe “rush” isn’t quite the right word, because movement speed is Rapture’s most prominent problem. Your character walks at an achingly slow pace -- honestly, the movement speed is slower than nearly any first-person game in recent memory. This problem doesn’t really boil over at first, as I adored poking around each inch of the world in search of new scenes, clues, and details. But as you progress further into the environment and spaces start to become more and more open, it began to feel like Rapture lost respect for my time. This is especially frustrating when you realize that you missed an area of interest a ways back, and going to explore it means a solid 10 minutes of backtracking at a snail’s pace with little to do on the way – and even more aggravating when you think about how easy it would be for the developers to fix this.

Its a testament to Rapture’s high points that I was willing to power through this frustrating limitation and still really enjoy my time. When the pieces of the story finally began to come together, and I started to actually realize what was going on in the world, I was hit with an immense feeling of satisfaction. Even the most earth shattering of these revelations are presented in a way that’s painfully melancholy, but I wholly appreciated that Rapture made me actually feel connected to these characters and this place in a way that stirred something in me, which is a task not very many video game stories have managed to accomplish.