Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
PlayStation 4
Nothing for me to get nostalgic about here. I saw this game available on the PS Now and the name seemed vaguely familiar. I looked it up online and saw that it had gotten good reviews, AND it was pretty short. That's all I needed to see. It was a good game that I had never played before, plus it was short enough that I would have plenty of time to be able to try other games with my one week PS Now trial. Sounded great to me! So I played it.
And regretted it.
Story:
Things start out simple enough. The game takes place in a small town located in the British countryside. Some kind of cataclysmic event has taken place, and you are the only survivor. It is up to you to walk around and check things out and see if you can determine what exactly happened to all the missing people.
I hope this isn't too much of a spoiler, but don't get your hopes up. As the game progresses, you witness many flashbacks and snippets of past conversations that took place before the rapture. Some of it helps you understand how things started (there's an alien/celestial being that appears, and scientific experiments are done on it), but most of these conversations are just useless babbling. But still, you get an idea of how things started, which is cool. Unfortunately, the game goes nowhere with this information.
One thing that made the game particularly hard to follow from my perspective, is that the flashback conversations that you'd watch would not show what the characters looked like. You would just see vaguely humanoid blobs of light and you'd hear their voices. I am terrible at recognizing voices, so without a visual guide of what the characters looked like, it made it very tough for me to know who was who and how to follow what was going on. I would hear one characters voice in a flashback, and then an hour later I would hear it in another conversation. I'd be like: "am I supposed to remember who the fuck that is???" It's a mess.
The ending... dear god don't get me started. Useless. It leaves the player out in the cold, to the point where I completely failed to see what the point was of playing this game. There is no resolution. There are no clear answers. It is completely, 100% WTF. I've never felt more left out in the cold by a video game's ending than this one.
It's a shame, because I thought the premise of the story had great potential. We'll get to the gameplay in a moment, but before we go any further, I need to let you know that this is very much a story based game. Gameplay takes a back seat to the story here. Taking this into consideration, I couldn't possibly have been more disappointed with the direction this game ended up taking. They could have had me riveted if they'd done something better with the story. Instead they ended up failing miserably.
Gameplay:
I thought the game's storyline was rotten, and I think its gameplay is even worse. All you do in this game is walk, open doors, and examine things. That's it. Now, I am up for a good story based exploration game. That isn't the issue. The issue is that none of the elements necessary to make a good game in this genre work well together in Rapture.
I'll start out with a common complaint: your character's speed. Dear god, you control the slowest-walking asshole on the face of the planet. A perfect walking speed for a game like this would be, say, Skyrim's. I never have a problem with my character's speed in that game. Here, though, your character walks at an absolute snail's pace.
Despite being a pretty short game, the size of its world is actually pretty big. This makes your slow pace even that much more noticeable. It takes forever to get from point to point. Making your character walk so slowly seems to be the game makers' way of artificially lengthening how long it takes to complete the game. Or maybe it is meant to draw your attention away from how non-interactive this game's environment is. Most of the objects around you, you can only look at. There isn't much item interaction in the game. It gets boring, being forced to walk around at such a slow pace and not being able to interact with anything!
More complaining. The game lacks any kind of focus whatsoever. At first, the concept seems simple. Follow the flashing ball of light around the village and watch flashback sequences from before the rapture. Cool. But following the ball of light is easier said than done. It likes to race out ahead of you and disappear from sight. With your slow speed, it seems hopeless to catch up to it sometimes. Other times, it disappears completely, leaving you with absolutely no idea of where you are supposed to go next. Other times it just stops and doesn't move at all. Usually this indicates that you have to enter a building, but I didn't catch onto this fact until far too much time in the game had passed.
There are no action sequences in the game. No fighting, no shooting, no Quick Time Events. Literally all you do is walk and open doors. Occasionally you have to twist your controller in order to unlock certain in-game conversations that you watch. You can find and listen to audio recordings sometimes too. When, oh when is the audio diary cliche going to die in video games? I have mentioned this in past reviews: I am terrible at playing and listening to these things at the same time.
That sums up my time with the game. I wandered around aimlessly, listening to conversations that I would then zone out during because I was too busy trying to find out where the hell I was supposed to go next. And when I was listening, what I was hearing was either irrelevant or made no contextual sense to the game's storyline whatsoever. Meh to the eh.
Graphics:
I have to give credit where credit is due: the game looks phenomenal. Outdoors, indoors, it doesn't matter. Outside you have big green fields, rolling hills, streets, a whole village that looks and feels amazingly real. You spend a lot of time looking through peoples' houses and places of business. Not only do the environments look sharp, they are filled with all kinds of small personal details. The inside of an old person's house looks much different than a young family with kids. The church looks like a real church. The tavern with its polished wood counter and frosted glass windows looks warm and inviting. Small personal touches like notes, fliers, newspapers, and photographs are everywhere. The level of detail put into making the world of this game look real and believable is staggering.
There are really cool "dream" sequences too, where the lights go out and you have to walk through walkways lined with candles. The starry sky looks gorgeous and vast above you. Ghostly apparitions swirl about. Definitely play this in the dark with headphones on. It is a very immersive experience.
My one complaint, and I have already mentioned it: the characters! I really wish that instead of just blobs of light with voices, that you'd get to see what the people looked like. I still don't know if I would have liked the game any better, but being able to match a name and a voice with a face perhaps would have made things a bit easier for me to follow.
Sound:
Voice acting is good. I did occasionally have a hard time trying to remember whose voice was whose. The only character I consistently recognized was the guy who sounds like Ramsay Bolton from Game of Thrones. I was actually shocked to see that it wasn't him when I watched the game's credits. I wish the voices were a little more distinctively different, but overall, I didn't have too many complaints with the voice acting.
The game's music and atmospheric sound effects are top of the line. The wind blows, faint music plays, you can hear someone's radio transmitting in their yard a few houses over. There is an eerie feeling in the air. You follow the sound of the radio to investigate. Other times when you are lost, you can try to listen for the telltale shimmer sound made by the ball of light you are supposed to follow. The sound plays a huge part in creating this game's atmosphere. Graphics alone can't make a world believable. The audio effects definitely pull their weight here. Again, play this in the dark with headphones on. For better or worse, you will lose yourself in the world of this game.
The presentation of this game is very good. It's too bad that its storyline and gameplay don't match.
Overall:
Everybody's Gone to Rapture looks and sounds great. Let's get that out of the way. Okay? Good.
It doesn't matter. Its presentation can't save it. It's just not a fun game. It is not even that it is light on action and based on story. I have played games before that are mainly story based. Look at anything Telltale has put out there. The original Walking Dead is one of my favorite games of all time. It had a great story that kept me coming back chapter after chapter. Not the case here.
This game's story simply could not hold my attention. It is confusing, its disjointed, its filled with too many boring and irrelevant chunks of dialogue. I actually fell asleep multiple times playing this game. That should really tell you something.
The game is boring! There is no other way around it. Even though it is a relatively short game, it felt like it took forever to beat. Am I done yet? Am I done yet? Am I almost to the end? These thoughts constantly cycled through my brain as I trudged down the middle of an empty side street at my 2 miles per hour walking speed. I had stopped caring about the story. I didn't care about the characters. The game's gorgeous graphics had lost their hold on me. I just wanted it to be over.
I can't in good conscience recommend this game to anyone else. I am pretty easily entertained, and I tend to like most games I play, even if they have obvious flaws. Not every game has to be great, as long as I am having fun. That's all I ask. And there is no fun to be found here.
This is the worst time I have had with a video game in a long time. The only thing keeping it from getting a complete F is the fact that the game's graphics are so gorgeous, and that its world is so painstakingly detailed. That's the only thing it's got going for it.
Final Score:
D-
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