From 35a3bd5bae1894d1a95f50220e113a74abbea46e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Madison Scott-Clary Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2022 10:11:37 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] update from sparkleup --- diary/2022-07-25.html | 9 +-------- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 8 deletions(-) diff --git a/diary/2022-07-25.html b/diary/2022-07-25.html index b84a16b29..fbd39362e 100644 --- a/diary/2022-07-25.html +++ b/diary/2022-07-25.html @@ -13,13 +13,6 @@

Annotation: Rapture

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Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a 2015 first person video game by The Chinese room, who also developed the game Dear Esther. 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’t even really interact with the environment except in the most superficial of ways — turning on radios, picking up phones, etc. For this reason, this genre of game has been dubbed ‘walking simulators’. 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 — audio, visual, music, etc — 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.

Rapture 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’t appear to be a sudden or painless process. There are bloody Kleenexes1 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’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.

You eventually piece together that the scientists working at the V.A.L.I.S. observatory discovered a ‘pattern’ 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’s a flu outbreak), and those who are ‘infected’ 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’s a story of a town torn apart by small controversies, little stories, and an underlying resistance to change.

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