Everybody's Gone to the Rapture Reviews
The Chinese Room has managed to create one of the most insightful, meaningful, and emotional games that we've seen in some time, perhaps forever, and bravo to Sony for taking a real punt with something so completely arthouse.
Offering a rich atmosphere and meaty philosophical concepts. . . Everybody's Gone to the Rapture paints a different kind of doomsday to all preceding incarnations
Even without any engaging mechanics (mostly walking around listening and interacting), Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's world is incredibly engrossing.
Walking simulator as a term started as a dismissive joke, and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is the punchline, a shaggy dog effort determined to mock the idea that games need players. It's not meta. It's not clever. It's banal and tedious and if your narrative focused do-nothing game wouldn't work as a halfway interesting short story, then it won't be better just because you force people to walk slowly around a wholly un-interactive game space while you drip-feed them unconnected plot points.
Rapture's audio design is top notch. The sound design is truly one of the reason's why the game creates such an amazing and believable atmosphere.
It's a shame that Everybody's Gone to the Rapture falls for the trap of slowing players down to force engagement because it does the exact opposite. There's plenty to latch onto here, but the slow movement speed and technical problems distract from the otherwise moving story.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is an incredibly engaging piece of fiction. Its investigation into humanity and relationships far exceeds its desire to wow you with action. It is a slow game, a contemplative game, and it's one of my favorites this year.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is really more of an experience than it is a game. There is replayability in going back to see if there are any clues you might have missed, but the game already does a decent job of making sure you see what you need to see.
[I]f you're the patient sort who likes to slowly explore every nook, or who craves a gaming experience that's less exciting and more thoughtful, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture might be the light in the dark you've been looking for.
What Everybody's Gone to the Rapture accomplishes with the well-worn post-apocalyptic genre is remarkable.
Everybody's gone to Rapture… but sadly not everyone will like it.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is an absolutely stunning game, but once your initial awe for the visuals begins to fade all you're left with is a drawn-out narrative that has you wandering from one story set-piece to another.
Spend this game's five-hour runtime catching up on a better story game you might have missed.
Rapture's biggest weakness is bigger still, because those who are put off more thorough exploration will get less out of it than others. Some players will reach the end without knowing half the story. But maybe that's okay. You get as much as you put in, after all, and the variety in experiences will give people something to talk about.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is an interactive work of art. Those of us who can be demanding when it comes to the realm of virtual storytelling might spot some minor flaws. Aside from those flaws, and beyond those who complain about the speed and lack of input commands, the game stands tall in its efforts to reach a new level of interactive storytelling.
Games are at their best when they subvert expectations, or challenge longstanding norms. While Everybody's Gone to the Rapture mostly accomplishes this by questioning traditional videogame storylines, it stumbles, and falls back on the very thing it's critiquing. That, however, doesn't detract from the overall worth of the human experiences that underpin it.
Nice as it can be to look around the world of Everbody's Gone To The Rapture, its story is dead, empty, and filled with redundant notions of player engagement.
This is a world that has seen an unfathomable change and walking through this empty world that still has elements of life lingering around is a unique experience that I doubt you will get anywhere else this year.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture has an original and engaging story to tell over its roughly 5 hours of play time. If you enjoy narrative-driven games it could be worth a look, but it's not a huge step forward for the genre.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is an extraordinary piece of work, with things to say about pacing, writing, world-building and the communication of emotion that feel profoundly valuable to the industry. Along with its peers in this curiously expanding genre of being-in-the-world simulators, it will undoubtedly feed more furious debate about what games should be and what playing them should involve, but its great achievement, for me at least, was to render any such question spectacularly irrelevant during the time that its experience lasted.