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                 <h1 id="annotation-rapture">Annotation: Rapture</h1>
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 <p><em>Everybody&rsquo;s Gone to the Rapture</em> is a 2015 first person video game by The Chinese room, who also developed the game <em>Dear Esther</em>. Both of these games follow the pattern of solving a mystery by navigating a map and piecing together a story from events. There are no puzzles to solve, no enemies to fight. You don&rsquo;t even really interact with the environment except in the most superficial of ways &mdash; turning on radios, picking up phones, etc. For this reason, this genre of game has been dubbed &lsquo;walking simulators&rsquo;. While this is usually intended to be derogatory, there are a great many aficionados of this particular form of interactive fiction. What makes them work is not just by adding dimensions to the story in the form of media &mdash; audio, visual, music, etc &mdash; and the nonlinear nature imposed by having an open world to walk around in, meaning that you run into story beats when you reach a certain places on the map or, as mentioned, interact with certain objects.</p>
 <p><em>Rapture</em> in particular works by having an open map of a small British town. Befitting the name, everyone has, indeed, gone to the rapture, though it doesn&rsquo;t appear to be a sudden or painless process. There are bloody Kleenexes<sup id="fnref:kleenices"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:kleenices">1</a></sup> scattered around, cars run up on sidewalks, a broken banister to a staircase. As you wander around the town, you slowly piece together the story of what happened by interacting with major, minor, and ancillary story events. You&rsquo;re guided throughout by a floating orb of light that will gently guide you towards these events. Major story events take the form of flashbacks that bring you a lot of information all at once, minor story events happen as you walk past a location, and ancillary events can be heard through radios and ringing phones.</p>
 <p>You eventually piece together that the scientists working at the V.A.L.I.S. observatory discovered a &lsquo;pattern&rsquo; which seems to be flowing through both the air and the phone lines. It works rather like a disease (they even try quarantining the town, thinking it&rsquo;s a flu outbreak), and those who are &lsquo;infected&rsquo; are eventually subsumed by light and bodily taken up. You learn this through six different characters, from the local priest to a nosy neighbor to two of the scientists working at the observatory. It&rsquo;s a story of a town torn apart by small controversies, little stories, and an underlying resistance to change.</p>
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-                <p>Page generated on 2022-07-31</p>
+                <p>Page generated on 2022-09-06</p>
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