Everybody's Gone to the Rapture - Review

Callum Munro

(I try my hardest not to spoil any major parts of the plot) 

My reviews are split into 3 sections that are rated out of 10, CONCEPT (The aim/idea/plot of the game), VISUALS (What the game looks like), GAMEPLAY (How the game plays and how fun it is).

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is the latest project by The Chinese Room, developers of Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
The game was released exclusively for Playstation 4 on 11th August 2015 and you can buy digitally from the PS Store for £15.99. 

Concept/Story

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a narrative driven game, no doubt about it. The story basically is about the end of the world, and as the player you must walk around a deserted British town, unraveling the story piece by piece, finding out more about what exactly happened through strange light memories that are placed around the town.

The story is beautifully told, with wonderful music, brilliant voice acting and an even better script. It however does suffer from serious pacing issues and a woefully anti climatic ending. 

So lets discuss the pacing issues. Well firstly you get thrown in, and you know absolutely nothing, which is great, i'm all for finding out the story yourself. When you are about 3 hours into the game and the only difference is that you now know a few peoples names, and who was having an affair with who makes the game excruciatingly slow and choreish, unless you thoroughly enjoy your British soap operas. 

As you get to the final third of the game, it starts to build up a little bit and you start piecing together bits and pieces with some absolutely beautifully written dialogue pieces.

I also personally found that the ending seemed extremely rushed and unimportant. Especially when through the whole game you have been treated to an extremely slow, but built up story-line, only to be ended with what can only be described as a blatant and uninteresting conclusion. Not a single twist to the story, and to be honest with you, the actual reason for why everybody is gone is so incoherent that it probably would have been best to leave it too our imagination. 

Dont get me wrong, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture has a beautifully told story, and the script is excellent, however as nicely told as it is, the story as a whole never really gets anywhere interesting and instead thrives off of its wonderful music and dialogue. 

CONCEPT/STORY - 7/10

Visuals

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture looks astonishing. 

The developers have perfectly captured the character of the British countryside with intricately designed environments and a huge attention to detail. 

As the game focuses around light, you are dealing with a lot of visual particles throughout the game, which are always hard to get right in any game, but with the exception of some slowdown and a some frame rate drops, it looks brilliant. 

The art style and graphical nature of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is excellent. It is only let down by some technical problems where the frame rate will drop to around 15fps or lower. 

VISUALS - 9/10

Gameplay

I would love to talk to you for hours on end about the gameplay of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, but I simply cant. 

This is because there is hardly any gameplay to talk about.

Now I understand that it is a different type of experience, and all of that, but it is awful how the only things you can actually interact with are a few radios and some select doors.
After all a game is an interactive experience at its core, not just a story where you flick the analogue stick up and tap X every 20 minutes. 

Not only is there hardly any interaction, but you also travel around at a dead snail's pace. Even when using the "sprint" button, it takes about 5 seconds to actually reach the higher speed and that speed is barely any quicker! Plus you can only use it in certain areas, which takes the "choice" of having a sprint button right away from you!

So Everybody's gone to the Rapture may be this different narrative driven experience, but at the end of the day this is still a game, listed on the store of a games console for £15.99! A game which has little to no world interaction or any redeeming gameplay qualities at all really, making the game painfully slow and boring at times.

GAMEPLAY - 2/10

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture does have a really well written narrative, combined with some lovely visuals, and there is absolutely no taking that away from it. However it is still a game, and if a game has barely any interaction then it is basically just an interactive museum tour where all you do as the player is push your analogue stick around, whilst pressing X every now and then to open a door. 

As always thanks for reading.

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