Journey. Gone Home. Dear Esther. If you're a fan of any of these three games, the Chinese Room's newest entry into the narrative heavy walking simulator is the game for you, and only you. Dear Esther was the developer's previous title, a two hour experience that more closely resembled visual poetry than a game. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture combines the visual and aural cues of the developer’s previous tale with a far more ambitious open world setting. Ambitious...and risky.
Understandably, the creators of this narratively dense affair encourage the player to experience the world they’ve created. Fullbright’s Gone Home was an expert example of setting, simply because the protagonist need only explore a two story house. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture attempts to recapture that intrigue within the confines of an entire village, and unfortunately, the results aren’t always as rewarding.
Rapture’s fatal hindrance is in movement. And that was before it was revealed on launch day to have an actual sprint button. Regardless, getting around the desolate town of Shopshire is an incredible slog. An outright bummer in a game that contains such a neat idea. The gameplay consists of literally following around an orb of glowing orange light. Slowly. Traverse off the beaten path, i.e. anything that isn’t a road the orb is flying over, and you may spend ten minutes trying to relocate it.
You see, the orange ball serves as the games waypoint, its critical path. In this regard, Rapture most reminds me, surprisingly, of Irrational’s Bioshock Infinite. Veering off and exploring is constantly recommended in that tale, and your rewards came in voxophones that had the potential to unleash plot revelations deeper than the actual in-game cutscenes. Rapture has these components too, mostly by way of payphones (this is the 1980s) and archaic radios. And while the glowing orange ball of immaculate light is a pretty effect, I would’ve preferred Infinite’s arrow marker as a device to use in the event of getting too lost.
The lonely trek through Shopshire is only reinforced by the severe lack of visible characters. Your sole objective is to piece together the tragedy of this city, but once again, the light serves as the conduit by which you observe past characters. Turning the game’s subtitles on is nearly as much of a recommendation as having a proper run button, because you will have no idea who is talking otherwise. Watching two faceless silhouettes of light go back and forth about a topic is confusing enough with the subtitles on. Without spoiling anything, there’s a priest, a couple scientists, an old lady, an old man, and a couple younger women which comprise the entire cast. I think?
In addition to the visual confusion, the nonlinear timeline of events is so hazy that I gave up on all but two of the characters about halfway through. The player has no idea at which point an event occurred; we usually only know that someone is angry at someone else, and then the scene ends. And speaking of the “player,” it is never explained just who exactly you’re supposed to be controlling. Is it a human character investigating the aftermath of this incident? Or is it simply a curiously ethereal entity which can only move about as fast an old lady doused in molasses?
I was genuinely excited for an open world take on Gone Home, without really thinking about how a game like that would actually end up functioning. And regardless of the movement, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture fails to deliver consistently engaging moments; only so much of what makes a game interesting can be sacrificed before it devolves into a mindless chore of following an orange ball to the next objective. And then standing. And listening. And waiting for something, anything, to happen.