E3 2014: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Is it Even a Game?

This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.

It's rather odd when you're presented with a game that's billed as post-apocalyptic, yet you find yourself standing on a farm track, looking across a beautifully lush English country landscape at a quaint farmhouse in the distance. No rubble. No mutants. No disorder. Just blue sky, the sound of insects lazily buzzing across the fields, the rustle of a gentle breeze stirring the leaves... and a telephone ringing in the distance.

Yes, ringing. Because Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is set in 1984, the twilight analog years of the pre-digital age, when cold war paranoia still played strong on peoples' minds, and information was delivered by newspaper, television and radio. However, it seems that nobody is here to read the papers, watch TV, listen to the radio, or even pick up the phone - except you.

The creation of The Chinese Room, known previously for acclaimed indie titles Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a non-linear storytelling game. That phrase will no doubt send gun-toting action freaks diving for cover, and may I say - quite rightly so. This is the antithesis of high-energy, objective-driven, traditional gaming. There's no threat, no health bar, and no weapons. Indeed, there's not even a fail state. "The only failure is if the player isn't interested," jokes creative director Dan Pinchback.

So what exactly is it, then? It's slightly tricky to explain, but the concept is best explained as such: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture presents a completely open world for the player to explore. There are pieces of narrative, clues and events within its environment that are triggered by the player's presence that slowly combine to paint a bigger picture of what transpired in the days leading up to where the game begins.

The interesting thing is that because Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is non-linear, the order in which events are experienced can lead the player to have different perceptions of what's going on. A person sounding like they have good motivations at first might later, based on a subsequently overheard conversation, seem to have more sinister ulterior motives. Or perhaps vice-versa if the clues leading that assumption are encountered conversely.

It's a clever construct, and one that's made fairly foolproof by the fact that nothing can be missed. Walk away while a conversation is in progress, and if you return, that same piece of conversation will pick up again. It sounds a little unnatural, but after watching this mechanic in action, it works really well - and also manages to avoid repetition. It's certainly less clunky than the traditional click-on-an-NPC-and-hear-the-same-dialog-loop, or stop-and-watch-a-cut-scene mechanics that tends to drive many narrative games.

What's clear - and isn't particularly surprising considering the developer's pedigree - is that this is an experimental game. Everybody's Gone to the Ratpure's success in engaging the player is wholly dependent on making its encounters and clues compelling and interesting. The developers are looking to bring a lot of detail to bear to help make that so. "We believe that the emotional connection the player will make with the game will be through the little things, says Dan Pinchback. "Things that they might recognize and relate to." Much of that is based on personal objects and artifacts, and the nature of interpersonal conversations. It seems The Chinese Room wants you to care about the characters. Not necessarily all of them - but at least for some to spark a personal connection.

In that sense, the game is subtle and interpretive, and because of that, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture will likely be too esoteric for players who appreciate their gaming entertainment a little more linear and viscerally-flavored. This is definitely a thinking gamer's game, and it's designed to drop you into its deep end in an unthreatening manner. If offers no guidance, so it's difficult to know where to start - but then when you step back and look at the game as a whole, that's the point. That is indeed the mystery. It's up to you to start where you think it makes the most sense to start. The objective is to try to piece together the bigger picture, and you do that by going about it your own way. Whether that begins with walking up the pathway to the farmhouse some way ahead, fording a brook and going across open fields, or heading up to the small copse in the distance. Or indeed just admiring the astonishingly beautiful scenery for a few minutes, taking it all in. It's up to you.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a bold concept, and one that pushes gaming into strange waters. It's part interactive drama, part game and part adventure. It doesn't really feature many traditional gaming tropes, and there doesn't even seem to be a hard finish to the game - more of a waypoint where you reach critical mass and finally put enough of the mystery together to understand it. But whatever it is, I'm really interested in seeing more of it. It looks absolutely gorgeous, and presents as compelling a mystery as I've seen in many a year.