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Everybody's Gone To The Rapture is to Gone Home what Gone Home is to Call of Duty. It is the walking sim of walking sims. It is an exercise in conceptual purity.
"Walking sim" is, of course, a term invented in a fit of existential panic by Real Gamers who urgently needed a way to write off Gone Home as not being a real videogame. It refers to games made in the mould of the first-person shooter but which don't involve any combat, or even any real fail-state, instead having you simply explore, converse and investigate your way through a story. Gone Home wasn't the first walking sim, but it popularised the genre, and paved the way for future work which developed it further (see: Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, and even Uncharted 4: A Thief's End).
The first walking sim - the first game to actually take an FPS and repurpose it into a narrative game - was The Chinese Room's debut effort Dear Esther, a mod for Half Life 2 that featured a lovely environment to explore, some music and dialogue to listen to, and absolutely nothing else. Everybody's Gone To The Rapture is their second game, and takes that idea and runs with it, convincingly making the case that actually, what Gone Home needed was to have even less things to do.
The setting is the most beautifully realized English country village ever rendered in an engine. The soundtrack is haunting, soulful, and transcendent. The voice work is straight from the heart. All else is surplus to requirement.
About the Game
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture drops the unnamed player character into the fictional and picturesque Yaughton Valley, Shropshire, UK, possibly at 6:07 AM on June 6th 1984, in the immediate aftermath of an unexplained Event that seems to have caused the populace to vanish with their tea still warm. It (implicitly) tasks the player with finding out what has transpired, by means of retroactively viewing various significant occurrences and conversations from both long before and during the Event, imprinted upon the environment by means unknown. Like any good disaster fiction, the appeal of the thing is not the exploration of the peril itself, but of humanity in the face of peril; how they rationalised it all, what they clung to when nothing else mattered, what they felt in their final moments.
The game is one giant mood piece, and the mood is melancholy.
Rapture has one of my favourite soundtracks ever - it's classical, in a way we don't make anymore. It's not religious (mostly), but there's a religiosity behind it; it evokes solemn contemplation, mystery, awe, and reverence. The voice acting is utterly and effortlessly authentic, with a cast plucked from the deep well of British television - click randomly around Rapture's IMDB page and you'll find minor roles from Casualty, Emmerdale, Eastenders, The Bill, Coronation Street, Midsomer Murders, Holby City, and more - and also Merle Dandrige, who you may recall as Alyx Vance in Half Life 2 and its sequels. Tying these together is an astonishingly successful photorealistic visual presentation, backed by CryEngine; sure, the framerate on PS4 is lucky to ever get north of 25, and they couldn't quite pull off all their very ambitious lighting gambits, but it works, and it makes Yaughton Valley the realest slice of English countryside I've ever seen outside of a TV show.
Rapture is a triumph of even the idea of the walking-sim genre. It is fragments of a compellingly realized story, scattered around an engrossing environment for a player to find. It shows that even with humbler narrative intentions and and absent any interactive complexity, these kinds of stories, presented in this kind of way, can hit home.
About the LP
This is going to be a completionist-ish LP. The game's one concession to videogame-ness - probably a direct result of collaboration with Sony - is a list of bizarre and arbitrary achievements that nobody could possibly care about. I won't be getting those because they are unbelievably dull. I will, however, be showing 100% of the story content, and unpacking it in the thread, because there is a lot going on in this game.
I am playing the Steam version of the game because I have a rig that can run it at 1080p60 most of the time - alas, CryEngine sometimes briefly requires about 2000% of my GPU.
The game is nice enough to be neatly divided into six chapters, each focusing broadly on one principal character, so I will post one of those per week. This is not a game that outstays its welcome.
Watch the episode before reading the rest of its post! The posts are intended to recap and unpack.
Content Warning:
This game engages heavily with death and mortality. It isn't explicit at all, but we're going to dwell on it a lot, and the developers definitely seek to elicit an emotional response.
Absolutely No Spoilers.
Watch the video!
Rapture is not a particularly religious game, although you might be forgiven for contesting that point given the etymology of the term "rapture" and the fact that our first primary character, Father Jeremy Wheeler, is a priest going through a crisis of faith, whose theme and leitmotif, The Sleep of Death, quotes directly from the book of Psalms;
King James Bible posted:
Psalms 13:
1 - How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? Forever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
2 - How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?
3 - Consider and hear me, O Lord my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;
4 - Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved.
5 - But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.
6 - I will sing unto the Lord, because he hath dealt bountifully with me.
Oh, and while we're on this topic, the first piece of music we hear in the game, and some of the last words uttered by Jeremy, is also from a Psalm;
King James Bible posted:
Psalms 19:
1 - The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
2 - Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
3 - There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
4 - Their line is gone out through all the Earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun.
Literary concerns aside, Jeremy is also pragmatically ideal for an introductory character; as the parish priest, his work brings him into contact with everyone, and everyone into contact with him.
We never actually learn much about Jeremy's relationship with God. That he has even had difficulties with his faith at all is mostly informed by the Psalm referenced in his theme, and inferred from some of his actions. He isn't just a priest; he wants to be a pillar of the community and earnestly wishes nothing more than to do right by his parishioners. He tells Kate that attending his church is more a matter of community than faith, and means it - not that Kate finds this compelling. Jeremy spends most of the duration of the Event seeking out people in need of help, and helping them, as is his calling. Many of the memories we see are just of him doing the rounds, checking up on people.
Unfortunately, Jeremy has a skeleton in his closet, which has turned him into a pariah, and which is the source of the animosity between him and Wendy Boyles. When Wendy's brother Frank's wife Mary was terminally ill and in pain, Jeremy - at Mary's request - sourced and administered a lethal dose of morphine, euthanising her. Wendy eventually learns of this - because Wendy eventually learns of everything - and confronts Jeremy about it, accusing him not of breaching any moral code, or breaking any law, but violating scripture, incurring the wrath of God. It seems that Wendy then put the word out; from their conversation outside the rectory, it's suggested that not very many people attend Jeremy's church these days. Recall again what he tells Kate: "They see me as an outsider here, too". It is clear that despite this, Jeremy has no doubt that he did the right thing, and he is satisfied simply to have acted morally, even if Wendy, or the whole village, or perhaps even God himself, never forgives him. Wendy throws Matthew 6:1 in his face, but Jeremy already lives by those words more fully than she can ever know.
Jeremy is among the last of the villagers to die, and therefore has some awareness of the Pattern that is at the heart of all that has transpired. We don't know the full extent of what he has witnessed at that point, but we do know that he watched a confused and despairing Howard Lantham vanish before his eyes, talking about voices in the light. With nothing else to do and nobody left to help, he goes willingly to his death, choosing to spend his final moments in his church. He calls out to the Pattern, or perhaps to God - the distinction doesn't seem to matter to him - announcing, probably in complete sincerity, that he wishes to attend once again to his parishioners. All the same, it is God's name on his lips when he finally succumbs.
In the course of seeing Jeremy's story we meet almost everyone else of note in the village. This includes the five other characters who will eventually have their own chapters - Wendy, Frank, Lizzie, Stephen and Kate. We also meet a number of other recurring figures playing out their stories.
One such is the village GP, Dr Phillip Wade, and his assistant Barbara Foster (with whom Jeremy had conspired to obtain the morphine). Dr Wade's surgery is overrun with nervous villagers suffering from an inexplicable illness. The local Emergency Measures Committee has told them that it is a new strain of influenza. The doctor is, of course, not convinced of this for a moment, and it only briefly placates the villagers. Eventually, people begin to vanish without trace, leaving nothing in their wake but shimmering ashes and confusion. Inevitably, the doctor himself falls victim to the illness, and begins to realise its extraordinary nature.
We also meet Amanda Mason, mother of two. In the early days of the Event - still believing the mysterious pandemic to be the flu, and upon learning that the village is soon to be quarantined - she and her husband Neal attempt to leave the valley with the children and stay in Wales until the crisis blows over (Shropshire is right on the border between England and Wales, so this isn't a very long journey). They aren't quick enough, however, either for the quarantine or for the Pattern, and they wind up at Barbara's house just as the kids begin to show symptoms.
Finally, we learn about Clive Smith, who works for the Emergency Measures Committee. Specifically, we learn that he has been in contact with Stephen, and that it was at Stephen's repeated urging following whatever it was he and Kate did up at the observatory that the EMC enacted the quarantine of the valley.