[REVIEW] Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

 Games in which you explore a landscape in order to piece together a mystery seem to be my thing lately. After The Town of Light, I wanted to see what else I could find in this “explorative” video game genre, and so when I discovered Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, I figured it would be another game that was right up my ally.

No surprise, I wasn’t wrong!

 

Developed by The Chinese Room and SCE Manta Monica Studio, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is an explorative adventure game set in a small Shropshire village, Yaughton, that has been abandoned. Your goal in the game is to uncover the clues as to why everybody has disappeared. Are they did? Did they all get up and run away? What happened here? You’re guided through the game by floating lights, some of which lead you to new locations, others shift and form human shapes that play out short scenes, interactions between inhabitants of Yaughton during the last few days before the incident you’re investigation, almost like a reflection or memory. Between those light-memories and a series of mysterious radio messages and phone calls (which also play out like memories of events, since nobody is actually calling and it’s more like a remnant of the phone call is stored within the phone lines), you piece together that the disappearance has something to do with a mysterious light anomaly that was discovered at the observatory, referred to sometimes as the Pattern, and often with a tone of fear and scientists Kate and Stephen learn that whatever this light Pattern is, it’s adapting and changing and influencing events around them.

Meanwhile, in the village, birds are dying. Cows are dying. People seem to be coming down with what is called the flu, but the town doctor is convinced that it’s like no flu he’s ever seen. The flu doesn’t tend to result in massive hemorrhage from every hole in your head. The town is quarantined, but somehow people keep disappearing. You see and hear a lot of this through the light-memories, which combine the regular mundane lives of Yaughton’s population with the strange events that increasingly affect their town.

UTTERLY GORGEOUS

 
The first thing that grabbed me about this game were the graphics, because sweet fancy hell, this game is simply gorgeous. It begins on a hill overlooking the village, a sunrise before you and the mists lying low in the valley, and I think a person would have to have a heart of stone to not be struck by the beauty of that scene.

Or perhaps it was something that appealed to me for particularly personal reasons. I’m from the UK myself, and though I’ve lived in Canada for the vast majority of my life, I still consider England to be my home, and I will often get homesick for it. Tough I don’t come from the Shropshire region (I was born near Newcastle, in the northeast), there’s something quintessentially British about the whole village that made my heart ache. The architecture of the buildings, the signs of community interaction, all of it made me terribly homesick, and for that alone I would probably love this game.

But this is also something I don’t expect most players to experience, since I imagine very few are in the circumstances I am. It’s a deeply personal reaction, but I mention it because it did influence me while I played through this, it did affect my experience of the game as a whole, and when a piece of art can make someone feel something so powerfully, even if that wasn’t the intent of the artist, I think that’s worth calling attention to.

FOLLOW THE LIGHT

 
It’s nearly impossible to get lost in this game. Though the paths and streets of Yaughton twist and turn and occasionally lead you to random places in the woods, the floating lights will always be your guide. You don’t need to worry about wandering aimlessly for too long, since if you lose track of the story and can’t figure out where to go next, it typically takes a mere 5 minutes of backtracking before the floating light will find you once more and lead you to the next part of the story. It’s a really good way of leading the player without railroading them, of guiding them while still letting them explore at their leisure.

And it is worth exploring around and not solely following the light. Sometimes light-memory scenes will be off the beaten path, revealing another little piece of the puzzle if you take the time to look for them. Other times, you just come across interesting pieces of scenery, like the ruined house I found in the middle of the woods behind the church. My partner played through the game after I did and completely missed that burned-out husk of a building. What you find and what you miss adds to the personal feeling of the game, the sense that you are really there, since not everybody will have the same experience as every other player. The game developers took the time to fully flesh out the town and add things that didn’t need to be there, but once there, they add to the realism of the experience.

SUBTLETY AND QUESTIONS

 
It’s hard to play this game and not appreciate the subtle hands that went into crafting it. Before you find out much about the supposed flu, you see bloody tissues on the ground every once in a while. There are quarantine notices on doors and windows, and occasionally ones slipped under doors as though somebody really wanted to hammer home to residents that the situation was serious. A scenic park and a lovely babbling brook yields a bomb half buried in the water, and you don’t find out what significance that has until well past the halfway point of the game. After a while you start to see dead birds lying on the ground, and conversations in the light-memories about how odd it is that all the birds are dying.

Of course, there are questions that get raised as the game progresses that leave me wondering whether some things were oversights or legitimate things to ponder. For instance, it’s the light anomaly that’s causing all the strange happenings around the village. The dead birds aren’t a sign of maliciousness so much as the light’s attempt to communicate, only it proved too much for little birds to handle. Same with cows. Same with humans, which is why there’s the “flu” going around. (Insects, though,are unaffected, because they’re too simple a life form to be so damaged by the light.)

Why, then, do we see no dead cows but we do see dead birds? Humans have vanished into the light, yes, and even the dead ones leave no trace of their bodies behind (hence the whole “rapture” part of the game’s title), but were the cows raptured too?

Clearly not all the birds in the area were affected, since the villages ambient sound features a whole lot of birdsong: are those new birds that flew in, or were some birds not so deeply affected as others?

 
The very end of the game reveals that Kate had pictures, just simple photographs, of the light anomaly, looking exactly as it does when we the player see it. Did she see them because she was one of the last surviving people in Yaughton, after the light had grown stronger and more able to communicate to things around it, or could others see it? If so, why do we never see that mentioned in the light-memories?

Little things like this are generally inconsequential, and they don’t really affect the story of the game. But they’re little things that keep tickling at the back of my mind, making me wonder if they were mere oversights on the part of the people making the game, or whether they were meant to hint at a more subtle piece of the puzzle, not feeding us information on a platter but making us work for it, think for it.

Or maybe I’m thinking too much about it.

WHO AM I?

 
For that matter, there’s another much larger issues that never really gets clarification. Who am I?

No, seriously, who am I playing as? That’s never really established. Everybody who lived in the village, well, went to the rapture, so I’m not one of them. I wondered if I might be Clive, the man that Stephen convinced to call an airstrike against the village in order to kill everyone so that the light anomaly wouldn’t escape into the outside world, because he’s pretty much the only non-villager whose voice you hear in this game. But if so, then why do I start the game in front of a locked gate with no visible sign of how I got there? Was I just airdropped in or something?

 Honestly, the best I can conclude is that I am some part of the sentient light itself, trying to make sense of the incidents that I accidentally caused within Yaughton. But even that doesn’t make much sense, because unlike every other encounter I have with the light, I seem to have mass. I can affect things physically. I can open and close doors. I can get stuck on things at the playground. I… can’t go through water deeper than my knees for some reason.

There is no satisfactory answer I can find to this. And I know I’m probably overthinking it, that it doesn’t really matter who I’m playing as because the main goal is to find out what happened in the village, not find out what I’m doing there. But it’s an unanswered question, and so it, like other unanswered questions, gets me thinking.

I will give the game credit for that. Even when it doesn’t answer my questions, even if there are no answers, it gets me considering what those answers might be. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a game that presents a deep philosophical concept that is just ripe for discussion. Heck, I had a nice long conversation with my partner about how whenever people look for extraterrestrial intelligence, they’re always looking for things that look and act like humans, that came from places humans could evolve and thrive, but rarely do you see much consideration of intelligence that might look something wholly unlike what we know and are. Why can’t light be sentient? Why can’t rock be sentient? Maybe it can’t here, because conditions aren’t right for that sort of thing to come about, but in the vastness of the whole universe? Who can say?

A THOUGHT-PROVOKING EXPLORATIVE MYSTERY

 
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture received high critical praise when it was first released, and after having played it, it’s easy to see why. It’s a slow-but-steady “walking simulator” game with a compelling mystery in an empty town populated by the memories of its former inhabitants. It’s subtle, brilliant, beautiful, and it far exceeded my expectations. It doesn’t have multiple endings or much replay value, but it’s also the kind of game that, if you do replay it, will have you looking more closely at the world around you, looking for signs and meaning that you might have missed on your first time through.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing this, and if you enjoy thought-provoking explorative mysteries as much as I do, then you’ll definitely enjoy Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. It can be beaten in about 4 hours (maybe a little longer if you’re meticulous with exploration), and it’s well worth your time.

In closing, I would like to say this: the rapture, for the people of Yaughton, took place about 12 hours before I was born. Only a little over 200 miles away. I’m literally not sure it’s possible for this game to resonate with me any more than it already does!