A walk into the abyss: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

I'm pretty nosy. When I go to people's houses, my attention is divided between the conversation and the mantlepiece as I scrutinise the family photos and wonder where the ornaments came from. Are those porcelain spaniels treasured reminders of an endearingly eccentric relative, or did my friends actually buy them?


Fortunately for everyone I know, my love of poking about has long been satisfied by gaming because developers are constantly refining the art of delivering narrative through environment. It's one of the most efficient means of interactive storytelling because it can be so easily integrated into gameplay. The player has to scour every room in a point-and-click anyway, so why not reward them with story as well as the key to the next level? Even in fighters, platformers and shooters, there's no reason why the environments should just be backdrops to the action when thoughtful design means they can convey character and backstory too.*

Beyond Good and Evil and Tomb Raider provide insight into their protagonists' inner lives through relaxed, combat-free sequences set in Jade's cosy lighthouse and Lara's heavily-modded mansion. The complex plots of the Deus Ex series are illuminated by information hidden in the messy offices of its shady corporations, while the Fallout series and The Last of Us tell poignant stories of humanity's last days through the abandoned homesteads scattered across their post-apocalyptic American landscapes.


In recent years, an increasing number of games have been entirely dedicated to this once ancillary mechanic. Known (mostly) affectionately as "walking simulators", these games are well-suited to the kind of small-scale human drama that can be drip-fed to the player as they rifle through the characters' stuff, gawping at the unfortunate state of their health, marriage and soft furnishings.

One of last year's most high-profile examples was The Chinese Room's Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Like The Last of Us and anti-Objectivist undersea parable BioShock, Rapture is set in the shell of a community that has been obliterated by a terrible event, and is still littered with the things its victims left behind. However, while The Last of Us' zombie apocalypse and BioShock's civil war are backstory for those games' main narratives, thus rendering exploratory detective work mostly optional, all of Rapture's gameplay is devoted to wandering around its abandoned world in order to learn the truth about the people who once called it home.

With my penchant for nosing around, I gleefully picked it up expecting a juicy combination of small-town gossip and quasi-religious sci-fi, but what I discovered was altogether more thought-provoking.


Set in the fictional West Country village of Yaughton, Rapture gives the player the power to walk, push open doors and turn on lights and radios, but nothing else. It is in many ways the maturation of ideas floated in The Chinese Room's experimental Dear Esther (2012), which marooned the player on a Hebridean island and gave them nothing to do except wander slowly around, listening to intermittent fragments of a story told in voiceover. It was highly atmospheric and very moving, and in my review, I explained how its lack of interactivity increased immersion:

"Because there are neither interactive elements nor threats, you start taking in your surroundings in a way that you would if you were actually on the island. Traditional level design is such that we tend to look upon gameworlds with blinkers, filtering out everything that signifies neither objective nor threat. Yes, design, appearance and detail can be put to great narrative effect, but when you must accomplish certain tasks in order to progress, exploring the environment often becomes a means to an end." 

This is slightly less true of Rapture as the player is always partly on the lookout for a crackling radio or a door left ajar, but such items are so widely spaced throughout the game that the overall effect is largely the same. Although the purity of this design yields rich narrative rewards, the lack of objectives means that there's little point in trying to assess the success of Esther or Rapture using traditional metrics. Even as examples of "interactive" narrative they arguably fall short because there is so little, well, interactivity.

To enjoy them at all, it's necessary to accept them on their own terms and be open to the experiences they offer rather than lamenting the lack of a relationship between input and reward. I was fortunate enough to be able to ask The Chinese Room's Dan Pinchbeck about passivity in Dear Esther, and he explained that the minimal interactivity and slow pacing were chosen to give the player time to experience emotions that games don't usually allow room for:

"What I think we found with Esther is that that sense of pace and emptiness buys time and space for an emotional reaction. I really think emotions work at different speeds. You can’t feel sad, fast."

While Esther is about trying to make sense of grief, Rapture is a much bigger game that uses similar techniques to take the player from disquiet through despair to an ultimate sense of universal wonder. It tells the story of Yaughton native Stephen and his American wife Kate, two scientists who accidentally summon a mysterious power, the Pattern, from outer space while researching the night sky from the observatory overlooking the village. By the time the game starts, the Pattern has somehow taken everyone, leaving Yaughton eerily empty.

The story is slowly revealed to the player through scenes from the residents' final days, played out by traces of the Pattern, which manifests itself in balls of light. There is no explanation given for the nature of the Pattern or the reason it emptied Yaughton, though the villagers who survive longest have their theories, which I'll get to later.

What's more, most of the scenes focus not on Stephen and Kate's experiments but on Yaughton's domestic dramas, whether it's the villagers' less-than-friendly reception of American (and black) Kate, a farmer's problems with his staff, or Stephen's busybody mother's interference in his marriage. This puts the focus not on the "space magic" but on the relatable and recognisable lives it disrupts. The juxtaposition between the provincial subject matter of these scenes - many could have been lifted right out of The Archers - and their otherworldly staging makes the overall effect extremely haunting.

Because the scenes are triggered in geographic, rather than chronological order, the player is likely to see a panicked family trying to escape the quarantine long before they witness the clandestine meeting of Stephen and an old flame, an event that contributes to Kate's isolation and thus her discovery of the Pattern in the first place. By shuffling the humdrum earlier sequences and the devastating later ones, Rapture imbues the former with a sense of creeping horror and throws the latter into stark relief. Destruction and death, especially in video games, can be numbing without a sense of the peace - however troubled - that they destroy.

Plenty of games motivate the player by constructing a beautiful world for them to fall in love with before exhorting them to save it (the aforementioned Beyond Good and Evil is a great example of this), but few show them one that's already been ruined and don't let them do anything about it. Even post-apocalyptic games tend to give players an objective: the Fallout series lets them build lives of their choosing in the Wasteland, and The Last of Us puts them on a quest to protect humanity's last hope for salvation.

By laying out the entire story after it's over, Rapture coaxes the player into an introspective relationship with it. Unable to influence events, all players can do is reflect upon their meaning. The lengthy gap between the surreal vignettes gives players time and space to do this, which they wouldn't have in a non-interactive medium. The beautifully-rendered and incredibly tranquil surroundings lull players into the kind of meditative state that they might achieve on a real-life walk through the British countryside, allowing them to fully absorb each mundane, heartfelt or disturbing fragment of the story.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rapture received a fair amount of criticism for this design approach, initially because The Chinese Room failed to alert players to the "run" control. This left many reviewers under the impression that their character's top movement speed was a glacial crawl that punished exploration with an excessively arduous trek back to the main path. Even once the "run" command was made public, a lot of the critics who disliked the game stuck to their original positions, partly because even the running speed was still slow by first-person game standards, and partly because they felt the world just wasn't interesting enough to warrant such minimal activity anyway.

One such critic was Jim Sterling:

"Indeed, the motive for this punishing movement speed was likely an attempt to make players more thoughtful and observant regarding their surroundings, but I can’t help but feel an arrogance in that design decision. Forcing the player to “take it all in” rather than making them want to is a case of developers simply strongarming appreciation. Perhaps if the world of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture was worth appreciating, I’d have been more forgiving. Sadly, as with Dear Esther before it, I can’t find myself particularly invested in a vacuous empty space with disembodied voices telling snippets of vague story."

The screenshots that illustrate this post are a mixture of The Chinese Room's official publicity screenshots, and ones I took on the PS4 version of the game. 

*If you share my predilection for playing Through the Keyhole with video game characters, I wrote about narrative through domestic spaces for the Escapist a while back.
** I was far more engaged in Gone Home's narrative when I was discovering it myself by going through my family's belongings than I was when listening to Sam's voiceover read her diary aloud. When it was triggered I felt as if the value of my hard work methodically searching every room for clues was diminished by an information dump that answered questions I didn't even know I had.