Across the village green, the small country pub looks inviting – especially when bathed in the orangey light of this warm summer evening.
It has taken a short walk to get here, along a quiet country road, then through the picturesque village of Yaughton, with its quaint cottages and bulging hedgerows. The only sound is birdsong and a quiet electrical buzz, perhaps coming from an overhead power line somewhere. No one is around – nor will there ever be again. Everyone in the village is probably dead and whatever happened here may have happened all over the world. This is a particularly English vision of the apocalypse – bucolic, refined and charming. But it is the apocalypse nonetheless.
It’s been three years since The Chinese Room, a tiny studio currently working out of a modest office building in Brighton, started work on Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Back then, co-founder Dan Pinchbeck had the idea of creating a game about the end of the world, but from a very different perspective than titles like Fallout and Last of Us, with their grand visions of ruined American cities. Influenced by science fiction writers John Wyndham and John Christopher, he and his team became interested in the idea of what Brian Aldiss once called the “cosy catastrophe” – a resolutely British idea of the apocalypse, containing very little violence or explosive trauma, experienced by small communities rather than mass populations.
“We talked about it, and we said, well, what is the important thing about the end of the world?” says Pinchbeck. “It’s not about cities being consumed in fire. Take the movie 2012 – the whole of California vanishes and you don’t feel a thing, it’s just ridiculous. The apocalypse is about people, and the connections between them. What’s really touching is parents waiting for their kids to come home - and what they’re worried about is that the buses aren’t running, not that the world is ending. It’s the little moments that get you.”
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, then, takes place in a small valley in Shropshire in the summer of 1984. Viewed from the first-person perspective, the player is simply dropped at the outskirts of the village, with no instructions and no idea about what’s happened. From here, you are free to explore the environment, investigating empty houses, shops and barns, looking for clues. There are notes to read, radio recordings to listen to and computer screens to study. The first thing you interact with is a Commodore 64, its flickering monitor showing weird footage and repeating some sort of code, like a numbers station.
It is, in some ways, a natural evolution of the sub-genre that Chinese Room helped found with its debut game Dear Esther, a hugely atmospheric mystery set on a remote Hebridean island. The style came to prominence in 2013 with the title Gone Home, about a woman returning to her family home and finding it deserted. Often termed “notgames” or “walking simulators”, these narrative adventures eschew familiar ludic elements like fighting and level progression, instead providing a single location and a set of environmental clues with which to uncover the story.
The genre has proved weirdly controversial, prompting angry dismissals from some gamers, who even question whether titles like Gone Home and Dear Esther are games at all. The Chinese Room team aren’t worried. “There’s a long tradition in games, of sections where not much happens. I think the best part of the whole Dead Space trilogy is the return to the Ishimura where you spend 45 minutes just thinking: ‘OK, when’s it going to happen?’. That’s the scariest part.
“When the player is not getting these constant calls to action, from the mechanics or resource management, or whatever, it lets the atmosphere grow. That’s not new, that’s classic game design. Our question with Dear Esther was: what happens if we let that grow to become the whole thing? We thought, let’s just make that the whole experience. So we built it as a Half-Life 2 mod and it worked – we had 100,000 downloads in less than a year, and a lot of serious FPS players liked it.”
However, whereas Dear Esther was an entirely linear experience, Rapture is totally open. You can wander around the village and explore interiors, then head out into the woods and beyond. The environment is rendered in incredible detail, from the cracked roads and sludgy woodland pathways, to the cottages filled with bric-a-brac and the washing lines, loaded with sheets flapping in the breeze. The period detail is perfectly pitched too, with recognisable approximations of classic 1980s cars – a Cortina parked near the pub, an Austin Montego abandoned at a roadside, and the odd BMX bike left propped up by a tree. The lighting is rich and redolent, casting a John Constable-like glow over the countryside.
It is an incredible achievement for a team of 15 people, especially as three of the artists are graduates, fresh out of university. Rapture is quite clearly a labour of considerable love. “We’ve ripped the village out and put it back in again three or four times,” shrugs Pinchbeck. “We have these discussions where someone just says sorry it doesn’t feel right. Jess [co-founder Jessica Curry] is really good at that – she comes in and says I know this is going to be unpopular but that just doesn’t work.”
“I am the destroyer of worlds,” says Curry.
With such a tiny team, the studio made the decision to not have any fully rendered and animated 3D characters in the game. Instead, there are certain locations around the environment where the player triggers strange, highly figurative cinematic sequences. These play out like ghostly, holographic recordings of conversations that took place in the days leading to the Rapture event. We see fragmentary visions of villagers discussing their lives and relationships; these spectres also hint at a flu-like sickness that’s sweeping through the area, and strange experiments at the nearby observatory. As you progress, you set open new sequences, learning obscure yet intriguing elements of the mystery. In other words, the game quietly and calmly sucks you into its looming Armageddon.
These sections, wonderfully performed by experienced radio actors, add to that whole sense of cosy Englishness. We hear of controversies in the village, love affairs and failed marriages, while clues about a coming disaster emerge. Something has happened at the observatory, some sort of force has been unleashed, but we discover this while also hearing about the daily lives of villagers. It’s like the Archers meets Threads, the seminal 1980s television drama about a nuclear war.
“My lovely late stepfather was a Radio 4 drama producer and my mum was a soap writer,” says Curry, who has also composed the game’s wrenchingly beautiful soundtrack (which we’ll cover in another article). “Maybe there’s something quintessentially British about those things and about how we tell stories. It’s the intimate against the epic.”
Playing Rapture is like suddenly finding yourself in an 80s BBC dramatisation of Tripods or Day of the Triffids – but the story is there for you to build. It’s unlikely you’ll find all the possible story scenes, recordings and clues so everyone may come out with a very different idea of what happened and who was responsible. There’s no one official intepretation.
“We want to inspire a collaboration between what the game gives and what the player gives – to provide a lot of space for your imagination to fill in the gaps,” says Pinchbeck. “That capacity to really inspire a player to come in and start creating all the links themselves ... this is something unique to games.”
- Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture will be released on PlayStation 4 on 11 August
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