Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (Review)

In the interest of full disclosure, my experience playing Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was marred by probably the most unfortunate glitch I’ve ever encountered reviewing a game at Indie Gamer Chick. In what turned out to be the second to last chapter, one of the guiding orbs I was relying on to prevent aimless wandering got stuck in the ground next to a tree. This apparently happened to more players than just me in a variety of locations, but in my case, it got stuck in a way so that I couldn’t tell the game was glitching out. Thus, I spent four hours trying to figure out how to activate the special story telling tree that didn’t actually exist and wandering around a town trying to figure out if I missed something to make it work. Now, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture has no puzzles in it, or really anything to do but watch the narrative unfold. But I was nearing the end of the game, so I figured maybe the developers had thrown a twist my way. How would I know? The game gave NO instructions up to this point. Stuff like this is sort of what you risk as a developer when you make what I’ve come to call a “Figure It Out Yourself Adventure.” But, I mean, look at it! It looks like it could be a climatic moment.

But no, it was just a horrific glitch. It gets worse. Once I figured it out, I ended the game, rebooted it, and the guiding light skipped the remainder of the character’s story I was on and took me straight to the final chapter of the game. Oh, and I was unable to return and finish the previous storyline. At this point, I became like the manure farmer with Alzheimers and completely lost my shit. Four fucking hours of wandering around trying to figure out what I was missing, only to find out the game fucked up, and on top of that, I didn’t even get a conclusion to the character’s story in the chapter I was in? I think I’m totally justified in being furious.

Not that it would have made a difference on whether or not I liked Rapture overall. I didn’t. I hated Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. I hated it, hated it, HATED IT! But I figured I should be upfront about the whole four lost hours and the lost character arc conclusion affecting my session.

The sad part is, I didn’t hate Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture initially. I was immediately sucked in by the premise, the spooky isolation, and the mystery of what happened. A town devoid of humanity, with creepy emergency broadcast sounds playing, and quarantine signage scattered all over. Some serious shit had clearly gone down, and I was positively intrigued. I won’t spoil the story, but needless to say, it didn’t last. The cause of this particular apocalypse is hugely disappointing. I remember feeling my heart sink when I realized what direction the story was going. Of the multitude of explanations and angles they could have taken, it seems like the one that had the most potential to disappoint is the route that was taken. When I realized where Rapture was going, I let out an audible “ohhhhhhh. Well, that blows.”

The game is set in England, so there’s roughly two thousand soccer pitches in the town, give or take. And for some reason, they all have a dog shit skid mark on them. Hey, in America we made OUR version of footballs brown for that very reason. We would rather not know what exactly we’re getting all over our hands.

Some people are saying Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture isn’t really a game, and others are saying it is a game and those other people are casual fucktards. Both sides are right, except the casual fucktard part, because art is always in the eye of the beholder. I’ll personally side with the Not a Game crowd and call it a “Game-like Experience.” I would define a game as something where there’s at least some form of a challenge or task to overcome. Rapture does have some trophy-based challenges (of which, I unlocked none except the “finish the game” trophy, though not for a lack of effort) but really the point is to just watch cut scenes unfold, then find the next cut scene. To the best of my knowledge, you have no control over the story, and the only thing you can do to change the story you see is to take it out of order or to simply miss parts of it. Which, judging by the “find everything” trophy’s rarity, you almost certainly will.

While the turn the story makes is disappointing, given how intolerably boring the characters are, I probably should have seen it coming. These are just not interesting people. You basically do the fly-on-the-wall thing, watching their lives immediately before the start of the game. While I’ll concede that the writing does feel naturalistic and “real”, real can be pretty dull. Some of it really dull. Like, we’re in the middle of the apocalypse and there’s cattle and birds dropping dead, people suddenly becoming violently sick and/or disappearing, and government people locking the town down. So, why do conversations still sometimes sound like petty office gossip? Even though they are aware the situation is bad. It’s weird. Even worse is you never see any of the characters. Everyone is represented by gold particle ghosts that, I swear to God, look just like the beaming effects from the recent Star Trek remakes. Judge for yourself.

If you find yourself stuck with a copy of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and hate it as much as I do, pretending the story is actually about Scotty getting drunk and beaming a town full of British people into oblivion as payback for the whole lack of Scottish independence doesn’t help at all. Trust me, I tried it.

How did that similarity never come up during production? I’m not even a Trekkie and it was the very first thing I thought when I first saw it. It was distracting. I’m guessing they did it this way because they made a beautiful (and bland, but still beautiful) town, but couldn’t quite come up with human characters to match the astonishing visuals they created. It feels like perhaps it was a cut corner. But I never could feel a connection to any of the characters. There’s too many of them, they all have generic names, many seem to have no personality, and frankly it was hard to keep track of them. Even fans of the game seem to side with me on this one, though people will say “but I found whats-his/her-face’s story to be good.” I didn’t. Not one. These are seriously dull characters. Well written I guess, in the sense that they don’t seem too outrageous or too fantastical, but I would hate being stuck with any of them.

I don’t get the appeal in games like this. I can’t even say Rapture is pretentious, because it feels genuine and heartfelt, but it’s so damn boring. Yea, it’s pretty, and yea, it has a nice soundtrack, but what games don’t these days? Also, your character moves slow, and sometimes the game glitches out on you and you start to move even slower for no damn reason. I had to pause the game to undo this multiple times. It turned out, there was a run button. Kind of. Holding R2 might make your speed eventually build up. Or maybe it won’t. Whatever. I don’t get the point of games like Rapture. Maybe it’s not a game, and more like a digital amusement park ride where you hop from one display of animatronic figures to the next. Even though I think the story took the least interesting paths possible, they still told a somewhat coherent story (with an ending as unsatisfying and lame as can be). Obvious care and effort was put forth to craft it. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture has no instructions, puzzles, challenges, objectives, or anything else you expect from a story told through a game controller . The only thing it can do that you can’t do in any other medium is potentially miss large chunks of the story. Since Rapture only exists to deliver a story, that seems like a bad idea to me. Then again, so does BASE jumping but people are into that too.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was developed by The Chinese Room
Point of Sale: PlayStation 4

$19.99 said, meh, still better than Left Behind in the making of this review.