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Also on: Windows
SERENITY WRAPPED IN FRUSTRATIONS
On the morning of 6th June 1984 you're looking down upon the pastoral, British setting of Yaughton Valley basking in the rising sun. An angelic voice on the soundtrack soothes you just ahead of the horrible realisation - the place is completely bereft of life. Where have all the people gone? Well, the game's title kind of gives it away, especially if you know the basics of the Good Book.If you're not a Bible scholar, you could play Everybody's Gone to the Rapture to the end and learn about what happened. Your task is to walk around the valley in the aftermath of something fantastical taking place, looking for clues and echoes of the past. What you'll learn revolves around the events in the last day of the Yaughton Valley lives - of birds dropping dead from the sky, of a supposed outbreak of the flu and the resulting quarantine, of love triangles and tensions, of people quarrelling and coming together, of hopes and regrets, of faith and science - you know, all the facets of life you could think of.
Central to the story is Kate, new to the area, and her husband Stephen, who grew up in Yaughton. They both work at the observatory in the area. As the story picks up we learn that they have detected a strange pattern of light in the night sky. It seems to have a life of its own that somehow affects all the creatures around it. As it descends upon the valley, the birds drop dead from the skies. It starts spreading to the cattle with the same result. And soon, it starts running rampant through the county, spreading through the telephone lines, television sets and radio receivers, infecting humans at an alarming rate. Kate chooses to call it - whatever it is - "the event".
When faced with their inevitable fate, the residents of Yaughton Valley start to scrutinize their own lives. In witnessing that, we too get to know them a little better. Sadly enough, in their final moments, just as they go gently into that good night, they get to the bottom of who they really are. These are sometimes tender, sometimes harrowing moments of insight. Rarely do we get such ambitions out of a video game.
Unfortunately, that's about all the praise I can muster for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. The Chinese Room's latest game tells a story too existential to be bogged down by distracting game mechanics. Playing it felt like being trapped inside a fever dream, trying to listen to a play on the radio, all the while being interrupted by bad reception. You'd have to walk around constantly to find it again.
And there you have it. You walk ever so slowly around the countryside and pray you find enough information to advance the storyline. Occasionally you'll stumble upon scenes that play out a little like in the movies. You cannot influence their outcome in any way, and you need to piece the events together into a bigger picture within your mind. Between those scenes is only the walking. The flaw is fundamental: Putting the narrative flow in the hands of the player adds nothing. It only serves to stall and confuse. It's a shame, because in the hands of a good editor, the scenes could add up to something pretty good.
A COUPLE OF WAYS TO PLAY
Yaughton valley is haunted by a few light phenomena that guide your way. They will help you find the important scenes. However, this is also an open world, with streets flanked by houses to search and colorful fields going off in all directions. Simply put, the landscape itself beckons you to leave the guiding light behind and go exploring on your own. Doing so will reveal that certain things like radios and telephones contain bits of story as well. To find them all you have to go way off the beaten path.I've played through Everybody's Gone to the Rapture twice, the first time roaming the county as I damned well please, the second time mostly following the light. None of these approaches worked particularly well. The latter resulted in a smoother narrative flow and was easier to follow. However, the guiding light skipped several minor paths and locations, making me miss out on quite a few scenes. Maybe those would have fleshed out the characters or helped to further explain the central mystery. Roaming freely ensured that I got the bigger picture.
On the other hand, going my own way also glitched the guiding light so that it got stuck in place a few times. This made it infuriatingly hard to advance the story. Without the light functioning, I couldn't easily find some of the crucial scenes. This prompted me to reload the game and replay that part. Since Everybody's Gone to the Rapture features auto-save, this solution didn't always work - my game once saved with the light already stuck in place. This forced me to instead walk aimlessly around the area, hoping to stumble upon whatever was required to advance the story.
This is not the first Chinese Room game to have faulty AI. The enemies in Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs behaved similarly, but in that case at least it helped my progress instead of halting it.
All in all, there are six chapters to the story, each and every one following a certain character belonging to a specific area you must explore. After witnessing enough scenes, you're ready to go to a central landmark and trigger the conclusion to the chapter. We get to hear the characters' dialogue, but we don't see the actual people, instead they're represented as lights resembling human shape, making it hard to tell them apart. Activating subtitles helps a lot, as they reveal the name of the speaker.
LIKE A HIGHLIGHT REEL
In 2015, when Everybody's Gone to the Rapture was released, story exploration was no longer a bold, fresh way to narrate a video game. Sound clips as part of storytelling have actually been around for longer than you might think. In one of the earlier instances I can think of, 1994:s System Shock, audio logs added the flavor of a horror story to the already hot dish of space station exploration, puzzle solving and combat. It gave the player a sense of belonging and a great reason to stick to a long, terrifying game.That can hardly be said of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. It's got the flavor of a good story and not much substance. It plays out like a highlight reel to something that I'd perhaps want to see, spread out over too much time - it took over six hours to finish. It raises questions I don't even want to consider: Who the hell are we controlling? And why does it have to take place in the aftermath? Why not allow us to control Kate, the central character, in the midst of "the event" instead? Which character was involved with the whom in the what now? I dearly wanted to experience the clarity and serenity the game presented me with, but it never resonated with me. The frustrations were just too many.
A good story alone doesn't make a game good. Between the few interesting scenes in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture there's a void. We're given nothing to do, and there's not nearly enough food for thought to apply meaning to the dead space. If we have relevant questions, we know they'll be answered in a scene we have yet to find. Finding that scene is a non-challenge. Just follow the guiding light.
Granted, there are a handful of profound scenes here, aided by great voice acting and fine writing. But that doesn't matter. To me the powerful story stuff in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture only proves that story exploration alone is not the way to go. It can serve as the stitches that hold good games together to greatness. It might make us want to apply meaning to our time spent with them.
But even then, the game mechanics have to be good enough. There's nothing of that in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. I don't appreciate it when the interactivity that set games apart from other media, is also the thing that rips a good story apart. It takes you out of the groove. This kind of game was a novelty once, but can we please move on now? Story exploration is making all the good ideas suffer. The existential dread at the core of this experience stems not from story, but from the futility of playing the story. If Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is supposed to inspire us to reflect on our own life choices, the result is quite the opposite.
Playing the game, I can't escape the feeling that I'm still only sitting on my couch, staving off real life with a controller in hand. Why is it even there? I would rather experience it on my mobile device, collecting the story by walking around my real life city, maybe even coming together with other people who share the same experience. Sure, such a game would have to scrap the idea of environmental storytelling to a large degree, but at the very least I'd get a breath of fresh air and some exercise, instead of just idle fingers and uninspiring thoughts.
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