“I am the destroyer of worlds,” says Curry. Jess is really good at that – she comes in and says I know this is going to be unpopular but that just doesn’t work.” “We have these discussions where someone just says sorry it doesn’t feel right. “We’ve ripped the village out and put it back in again three or four times,” shrugs Pinchbeck. Rapture is quite clearly a labour of considerable love. It is an incredible achievement for a team of 15 people, especially as three of the artists are graduates, fresh out of university. The lighting is rich and redolent, casting a John Constable-like glow over the countryside. The period detail is perfectly pitched too, with recognisable approximations of classic 1980s cars – a Cortina parked near the pub, an Austin Montego abandoned at a roadside, and the odd BMX bike left propped up by a tree. The environment is rendered in incredible detail, from the cracked roads and sludgy woodland pathways, to the cottages filled with bric-a-brac and the washing lines, loaded with sheets flapping in the breeze. You can wander around the village and explore interiors, then head out into the woods and beyond. However, whereas Dear Esther was an entirely linear experience, Rapture is totally open. Players get to explore the entire environment looking for clues, though there are regular maps and signposts that lead the way toward a mysterious observatory. So we built it as a Half-Life 2 mod and it worked – we had 100,000 downloads in less than a year, and a lot of serious FPS players liked it.” Our question with Dear Esther was: what happens if we let that grow to become the whole thing? We thought, let’s just make that the whole experience. That’s not new, that’s classic game design. “When the player is not getting these constant calls to action, from the mechanics or resource management, or whatever, it lets the atmosphere grow. I think the best part of the whole Dead Space trilogy is the return to the Ishimura where you spend 45 minutes just thinking: ‘OK, when’s it going to happen?’. “There’s a long tradition in games, of sections where not much happens. The genre has proved weirdly controversial, prompting angry dismissals from some gamers, who even question whether titles like Gone Home and Dear Esther are games at all. Often termed “notgames” or “walking simulators”, these narrative adventures eschew familiar ludic elements like fighting and level progression, instead providing a single location and a set of environmental clues with which to uncover the story. The style came to prominence in 2013 with the title Gone Home, about a woman returning to her family home and finding it deserted. It is, in some ways, a natural evolution of the sub-genre that Chinese Room helped found with its debut game Dear Esther, a hugely atmospheric mystery set on a remote Hebridean island. The first thing you interact with is a Commodore 64, its flickering monitor showing weird footage and repeating some sort of code, like a n umbers station. There are notes to read, radio recordings to listen to and computer screens to study. From here, you are free to explore the environment, investigating empty houses, shops and barns, looking for clues. Viewed from the first-person perspective, the player is simply dropped at the outskirts of the village, with no instructions and no idea about what’s happened. Photograph: The Chinese RoomĮverybody’s Gone to the Rapture, then, takes place in a small valley in Shropshire in the summer of 1984. The game presents a fictitious Shropshire village named Yaughton which is rendered in quite staggering physical detail, using Crytek’s Cryengine technology. What’s really touching is parents waiting for their kids to come home - and what they’re worried about is that the buses aren’t running, not that the world is ending. The apocalypse is about people, and the connections between them. Take the movie 2012 – the whole of California vanishes and you don’t feel a thing, it’s just ridiculous. “It’s not about cities being consumed in fire. “We talked about it, and we said, well, what is the important thing about the end of the world?” says Pinchbeck. Influenced by science fiction writers John Wyndham and John Christopher, he and his team became interested in the idea of what Brian Aldiss once called the “cosy catastrophe” – a resolutely British idea of the apocalypse, containing very little violence or explosive trauma, experienced by small communities rather than mass populations. Back then, co-founder Dan Pinchbeck had the idea of creating a game about the end of the world, but from a very different perspective than titles like Fallout and Last of Us, with their grand visions of ruined American cities. It’s been three years since The Chinese Room, a tiny studio currently working out of a modest office building in Brighton, started work on Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
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