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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