VII: Everybody's Gone To The Rapture

Recommended by: my partner Maddy

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (I'm just going to call this Rapture from here on) is a 2015 adventure game from The Chinese Room, mostly known at this point for ~~Warframe~~ Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and more recently responsible for Still Wakes The Deep.

I knew none of the above before playing this, despite having played Dear Esther, and what I did know actually fits into a pretty small bulleted list:

Rapture is the game that resulted from the developer wanting to make Dear Esther more interactive: Wikipedia says that this decision was made because adding any interactivity to Dear Esther proved too complex and then cites an article that does not say that, but either way, there is vanishingly little interactivity here. There's an Orb Of Showing You Where The Next Cutscene Is™, it flies around to various places. Periodically you'll hear a phone ring, or a numbers station playing out of a radio nearby (when wearing headphones these are panned clearly enough that you can generally tell where they are, which is a really nice touch of sound design), and they can also be found and clicked for extra backstory. You walk near the Cutscene Orb and sometimes you just get a cutscene and sometimes you have to hold right click and drag it into the correct position first; this is one of the game's only real "mechanics" other than finding some hidden collectibles and looking for some optional collectibles, and finding the various radios and phones throughout the game. It's very, very on rails, for better and worse, though I did learn that the Cutscene Orb is required for cutscenes, because one time it got stuck in a hedge outside a bar instead of going to its next location and that was a softlock. (My QA aura continues to make itself known.)

This game is...difficult to write about without spoiling. It is, roughly, the story of an influenza outbreak in alternate-history Scotland that is actually an alien invasion, with a lot of nods to post-war British apocalyptic sci-fi. (The developers name-drop their influences often in interviews) I have heard often that people found Rapture to be cozy, warm, optimistic; the phrase "cozy catastrophe" is not just a Bemani song, but was specifically coined to describe this era of science fiction writing.

I see...none of this, really. I found Rapture to be immensely depressing, the sort of story in which you watch an apocalyptic scenario unfold and which has an ending with even more terrifying implications than are contained in the story. I felt no joy, no coziness, and moreover don't really know what people who do see those things in it see. Both of the most important characters in this story are horrible to each other and often to the people around them. You know literally nothing about the player character, so there's little-to-nothing to attach to there past unanswerable questions like "who could they possibly be?"

And that's not to say that I didn't enjoy parts of it. The soundtrack is absolutely gorgeous, and it's very good at telling the story that it wants to tell. It's well-acted, and just non-linear enough in its narrative to make piecing the various threads together interesting. And hey, it definitely left me something to think about. Unfortunately, that something is "why did I leave Rapture feeling mostly just grumbly when I will not shut the fuck up about 1000xResist, a game that also contains a lot of terrible people being terrible to each other by weight. It's a strange sensation to have come away from a three hour game feeling like it wasted my time? I cannot, at time of writing, unpack this much further. I just don't see a world in which I'll really be thinking about this game at all more than a week from now.

...okay but I will still be listening to its soundtrack.