The English village where nothing is left to do but listen

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture begins with an ending. The Chinese Room’s 2015 adventure game drops you into Yaughton, a Shropshire village that stands empty. Toys sit forgotten in the playground. Quarantine leaflets blow around the churchyard. Down on Appleton’s farm, the crops go untended.

The game came out for PlayStation 4 on 11 August 2015 and for Windows on 14 April 2016, published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It is a first-person, single-player story about what happened here, and it is one of the strangest and most beautiful things the studio has made.

Trailer, via IGDBcom.

Yaughton Valley, 1984

The game takes place in 1984. The player walks an open valley and tries to work out how and why everyone is gone. There are floating orbs of light in the air. They lead you to scenes made of human-shaped lights, which re-enact events that already occurred. You can also touch doors, radios, phones, fences and power switches.

Telephones and radios replay conversations, recordings and broadcasts. Piece those fragments together and you get the main event: the “rapture.”

Kate Collins and Stephen Appleton

The story runs across five areas, each built around a different character. The two at the center are Dr Katherine “Kate” Collins and her husband, Stephen Appleton, both scientists at the observatory.

Kate and Stephen find a strange pattern of lights in the night sky. They believe it is an unknown form of life. They watch it infect and sometimes kill other lifeforms — birds, cows — before it spreads to humans. Kate decides the pattern is trying to communicate, and that it does not understand the harm it causes.

Stephen reaches the opposite conclusion. He becomes convinced the pattern is a deadly threat capable of destroying the human race. Kate, after confronting him about his affair with his former fiancée Lizzie Graves, locks herself in the observatory and spends most of the story trying to talk to the thing.

Meanwhile the valley gets sick. Residents show symptoms of unexplained haemorrhaging and pressure in the brain consistent with a brain tumour, as a doctor notes in a left-behind recording. Others simply disappear.

This story begins with the end of the world.

What the game asks you to do

The comparison to Dear Esther, the studio’s earlier game, is fair — Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a spiritual successor to it. But this one is bigger and more open. You are not on a rail. You wander, and the valley gives up its pieces at the pace you find them.

That is also the problem. The orbs and the re-enacted scenes are the whole of the storytelling, and they ask for patience. A player who wants to be told what happened will spend long stretches walking a lane with nothing but wind and radio static.

The rewards are real. The haemorrhaging detail, the doctor’s recording, the slow realization that Kate and Stephen are describing the same event and drawing opposite lessons from it — that is a story about people under a weight they cannot name, and the game holds that line without cheapening it.

Where the verdict lands

Here is the honest ordering of what matters in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture:

1. The village itself. Yaughton is the best character in the game, and the empty playground and the leaflets in the churchyard do more work than any line of dialogue.
2. Kate and Stephen’s split. Two scientists, one signal, two readings. That argument is the spine.
3. The orbs. A clever delivery system that occasionally becomes a chore.

The game is not for everyone, and it does not pretend to be. It is slow, it is sad, and it trusts you to assemble the ending yourself. Eleven outlets put the critic aggregate at 7.9 out of 10, and that number sits about right. The Chinese Room made something that could not work as a film or a book — it only works because you have to walk it.

Dear Esther · Everybody's Gone to the Rapture · game review · PlayStation 4 · The Chinese Room · walking simulator