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