Everybody's Gone to the Rapture Reviews
A leisurely stroll through a beautiful apocalypse. Rapture is stirring and heartfelt, but may be too slow and hands-off for some.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture excels at building a dense world, evocative tone, and rich cast of characters. Its five hours are filled with some really great exploration, discovery, and memorable moments. Piecing together its web of heartbreak, loss, and ultimate revelation provides a great experience. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture rewarded my patience with a fulfilling journey.
As the game continues to pull these wonderful tricks of staging, the world of things that The Chinese Room has created settles into a more comfortable balance with the game's other elements, giving ground when needed to the human - and the inhuman - drama that's unfolding. Counter to my own expectations, this is not a particularly complex story to follow, but it is told with a wonderful assurance and a disciplined eye.
An exceptional story, told via one of the most vivid game worlds around.
A sci-fi short story masquerading as a video game, and while it's often fascinating and beautiful it makes even other walking simulators seem fast-paced by comparison.
Eavesdropping on the echoes of the village's former residents is worthwhile, but the overarching mystery leaves a pretentious aftertaste
The studio behind Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs have achieved audiovisual and narrative excellence with their latest adventure.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture contains astounding humanity beneath its flaws
An enjoyable funeral walk through a depopulated English countryside, chasing beams of light.
Is Everybody's Gone to the Rapture a game, an experimental piece of interactive fiction, or is it perhaps even art? Whatever it is, the experience it delivers is a memorable one. It's gorgeous to look at, fantastic to listen to, and spins an intelligent and somewhat esoteric sci-fi mystery that's truly gripping through to its very end.
If you can let go of semantics and get involved in a story you don't control directly, then there may be something for you. It's a moving story told through gorgeous graphics, excellent voice acting, and a transcendent musical score that pleasures your ears during poignant moments. And yes, you basically just walk around much in the same way you can boil many games to just doing any number of repetitive actions. Give this a try. You may fall in love.
Rapture deals with mature, human subject matter -- failing relationships, aging, death -- with notable verisimilitude before acquiescing to its lurid, fantastical bent. The latter feels disconnected from the initially analog apocalypse and your thoughts on Dear Esther will likely echo off this ornate end. What Rapture does well feels slight. Interwoven character sketches stretched out like clippings of a short story dropped every mile.
As light on gameplay as it is, Everbody's Gone to the Rapture is as beautiful as it is thought provoking. It's hard to find fault with its technical prowess, showcasing just how detailed interactive media can be, but on top of this we have a narrative that is disjointed yet somehow works wonderfully as it increases curiosity, and music that is poignant in all the right ways. If Dear Esther was pretentious, in my eyes, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture can only be described as enrapturing.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is about discovering a story on your own, piecing together the details as you stroll through the countryside. What begins with curiosity in trying to explain what exactly happened soon gets you wrapped up in the lives of who it happened to.
Fans of slower-paced story games will enjoy it, but others may very well lose their patience.
Spend this game's five-hour runtime catching up on a better story game you might have missed.
It won't be for everyone, but for those that love Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, it'll stay in the memory for a very long time indeed.
Beautiful and intriguing, frustrating and flawed, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is nevertheless still worthy of your time.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's greatest accomplishment is making you care for its departed characters. Their personal stories give you an incredible glimpse of what life was like in their little corner of the world. They're not the nicest group of people. They can be selfish, stubborn, and downright stupid. But that's what makes them feel real and memorable. The most tragic part? You can't do a damned thing to save them.
The best way I can think to sum up this feeling is to say I enjoyed Everybody's Gone To The Rapture far more on PS4 and that was because after the first chapter I lay on the sofa watching and listening and luxuriating while my companion dealt with the controls.