Everybody's Gone to the Rapture Reviews
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.
Everybody's gone to Rapture… but sadly not everyone will like it.
What Everybody's Gone to the Rapture accomplishes with the well-worn post-apocalyptic genre is remarkable.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even without any engaging mechanics (mostly walking around listening and interacting), Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's world is incredibly engrossing.
Offering a rich atmosphere and meaty philosophical concepts. . . Everybody's Gone to the Rapture paints a different kind of doomsday to all preceding incarnations
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.
Until quite late on in the game, I struggled to figure out what I thought about Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. An absolutely stunning piece of visual art, it's somewhat let down by its impossibly slow pace, and the ease of which key plot points can be missed. It felt at times like I would rather have been "in the moment" of the apocalypse, experiencing the titular Rapture first hand, rather than piecing together the events after the fact. A game in which you sometimes struggle to find yourself caring about some of the people involved, but with enough atmosphere to enable life on the Moon, Rapture really is a mixed bag. If you want a change of pace from the regular "shooty bang" fodder, then it's worth a look, even with its (very obvious) flaws.
While it has its problems, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a memorable, emotional ride through post-apocalyptic England, rife with mystery, intrigue, and a sense of the unknown.
It's not a perfect game – There are some cheesy, overly melodramatic scenes that border on Soap Opera-esque levels of ridiculousness and the resolution will most certainly be unsatisfying for some – But it's almost a perfect experience.
Everybody's Gone To The Rapture really tried to be something more powerful than a video game. It tried to be art. However, instead of becoming a Mona Lisa, it felt as though the paint was still awaiting its first brush stroke. It never quite got there, but if it ever achieved that first stroke, it was bound to be brilliant.
If you think walking slowly around an empty village sounds like a load of bollocks, this probably isn't the game for you. It's more of an immersive narrative than an action-packed piece of entertainment, and if the PS4 wasn't already struggling with frame rates in this version, I'd say it's ideal for virtual reality.
As much as this game could have been a great suspense story, it falls short in making clear what the story is about.
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.
One of this year's easy contenders for game of the year, and for less than £16. That's what, a curry and pint?