‘Walking Simulators’ often get a lot of hate from gamers and non-gamers alike. Personally, they are my favourite style of games. By stripping away other elements, it lets the developers focus on great storytelling, interesting characters and intuitive gameplay. After experiencing this in games like Gone Home, Life is Strange and Firewatch, I was so excited for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture to make its debut on PC. Boy did my excitement dissipate quickly. While there are some redeemable parts to be found in this game, you have to stride through a pretty heavy stream of shit to find them. The shit is comprised of boring gameplay, two dimensional characters and an underwhelming story.

Let’s start with the things the game does well. Visually, it is beautiful. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture takes place in Shropshire County, a small county in England. Everything from the houses to the pubs to the gardens do a really good job of setting the scene. When you stumble into your first town, you want to be able to go and explore everything. For better or for worse, this setting is the video game equivalent to a beautiful dollhouse. It is great to look at, and clearly lots of effort has gone into the finer details of the environment, but you cannot interact with anything. This is great if you love dollhouses, but I always hated them for that exact reason. Well that and they were tiny, boring and you couldnt eat them. The developers, The Chinese Room, make some interesting choices in level design as well, such as having two accessible gates into a backyard but only one will open, or having every door open inside a house except for two. Good work The Chinese Room. The visuals do a splendid job of immersing you into its world, but as soon as you come across a bar stool that you cannot walk around, it snaps you out of it almost immediately. Games today have shown that with clever level design, the need for ‘invisible walls’ is nonexistent anymore. While I understand that it is probably something that is easier to do in some games rather than others, Rapture used far to many fences and tall hedges to still have the need for invisible walls as well.

Aside from the basic interactions you will have with objects in the world, the only other control you have are over (what I am going to call) echoes. The reason I am calling them this is because the game never once explains what these things are, or tells you what they are called. These echoes are yellow fissures in the world that when interacted with, will replay a conversation that happened there. To replay it, you drag your mouse left and right until you find the sweet spot to play it. It is through these snippets of dialogue and conversations that our story takes place. Each one will only last for around 30 seconds or so and, depending on the area you are in, revolve around one specific character. Despite Shropshire County having a small population, it still leaves many unanswered questions about most of the residents. By the time I had finished its short 4 hour story, there were still entire characters who I had no idea where they fit into the story or how they were connected to certain people. Despite the game only lasting around 4 hours, it is does not go quickly, in fact, quite the opposite. Walking is very slow, and running is not much faster, which even then takes 10 seconds before you have actually gathered enough momentum to move quickly. It feels like the game actively holds you back so that it can extend its own play time and make players spend more time looking at their environments rather than racing through them. If there are environments that are beautiful, I will take the time to explore them anyway. It’s a shame that this game tries to limit you, when it’s environments are captivating all on their own. I love eating burgers, but if I was made to slowly eat them all the time, I’d get sick of them pretty damn quickly.

Now you’re probably thinking, that’s alright, I play these games for the story and the experience, so that’ll be fine. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture certainly begins with plenty of mystery and intrigue, but it doesn’t take long for the story to start losing its way. If the title hadn’t already tipped you off, everybody has disappeared when you arrive and all you have to go off is a cryptic radio broadcast, some quarantine posters and abandoned vehicles. The plot focuses on two scientists doing some sort of experiment that creates some sort of, I want to say entity? It is a story that has been revisited time and time again, but Rapture doesn’t add anything new to the formula. What it does add though, is a whole series of affairs, ruined marriages, broken down family relationships and teenage crushes. By the end of the campaign, all these side stories are made redundant, leaving it feeling like filler content while you make your way to the resolution. The content itself is unstructured as well, meaning you hear conversations out of order, and the game provides no log to keep track of which characters you have encountered or any information about them. It is not a method that is new to video games, but it certainly doesn’t help the narrative in this case. Since you come onto the scene after the ‘rapture’ has occurred, you have no idea who these people were, or what their lives were like before this event. As well as that, you have no idea who you are playing as. You never get mentioned or referenced, you never see yourself and no one ever talks to you directly. There is nothing that connects you to any of the people in this world and you do not contribute to anything. You do not take part in the story, it doesn’t even happen around you, rather you enter after the story when everything is quite and normal. All of this culminates in an anticlimactic ending that tries to be deep and meaningful, but falls flat on both occasions.

After playing through Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, I had the overwhelming sense that this is a tech demo someone thought they could turn into a paid game. Yes the game is stunning to look at, even enjoyable to explore at times, but everything seems to be trying to make that the focus. The story feels like it is there only to explain the reason for why the rest of the world is so bland (you don’t ever see another person, alive or otherwise). Even the game mechanics are so boiled down, you could complete the entire game by only ever using W,A,S and D without ever having to do anything more. At the end of the day, it feels like the developers saw a trailer for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and thought ‘that looks awesome, lets do that’ but then never played the actual game. Just to clarify, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a fantastic game, this one is not. All this ultimately results in an overambitious game that doesn’t live up to any of its’ expectations.

When people think of a walking simulator, this is probably the sort of slow paced experience that they are imagining. If this was what walking simulators were actually like, I would 100% agree with them, but in reality they are so much better. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a step in the backwards for this genre, adapting nothing from other games that have seen success in this formula let alone adding anything new. It is disappointing to see that despite it having been originally released almost a year ago, none of the criticism from its initial release was improved upon for its PC debut. Seriously, it’d probably be less effort for the sprint button to just make the character sprint straight away. If you enjoy a game where you can explore an English environment at a leisurely pace or just really love walking simulators, you might get some enjoyment from this game. Otherwise, it is one of the rare games that I would say I would have been better off with my four hours doing something else.

4/10

Jonathan Ashcroft

Jonathan Ashcroft is a freelance games journalist who constantly seeks approval. By day, he’s a gamer. He also likes being mild mannered and gaming.