Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
Official game logo
Developer(s)	The Chinese Room SCE Santa Monica Studio
Publisher(s)	PlayStation 4 Sony Computer Entertainment Microsoft Windows PlayStation Mobile
Director(s)	Jessica Curry
Designer(s)	Andrew Crawshaw
Writer(s)	Dan Pinchbeck
Composer(s)	Jessica Curry
Engine	CryEngine
Platform(s)	PlayStation 4,Microsoft Windows
Release	PlayStation 4 WW: 11 August 2015 Microsoft Windows WW: 14 April 2016
Genre(s)	Adventure, art game
Mode(s)	Single-player

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a first-person adventure art video game developed by The Chinese Room and SCE Santa Monica Studio. It is a story-based game, taking place in a small English village whose inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared. It is considered a spiritual successor to Dear Esther, also from The Chinese Room. It was published by Sony Computer Entertainment and released for the PlayStation 4. The game was released for Windows on 14 April 2016.

In Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, the player explores a small English town whose inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared. The player can interact with floating lights throughout the world, most of which can reveal parts of the story. The player can also interact with man-made objects, such as doors, radios, phones, fences, and power switches.

The game is set in the 1980s. It soon becomes clear that the player is in a fictional deserted village named Yaughton in Shropshire, England, and must discover how and why everyone has disappeared. Mysterious floating orbs of light swim around the air and lead the player to scenes made up of other human-shaped lights, which re-enact various previously occurring events throughout the game. Following the orbs' evidence from scene-to-scene across the valley, as well as finding telephones and radios that replay conversations, recordings, and broadcasts from throughout the story, eventually provide all of the puzzle pieces to the game's main event (the 'rapture'.)

There are five areas in the game, each of which revolve around a different character, with the main protagonists being Dr Katherine Collins (Kate) and her husband, Stephen Appleton – both scientists at the observatory. During their work, Kate and Stephen encounter a ‘strange pattern’ of lights in the night sky which they quickly come to believe is an unknown form of life. They observe the pattern ‘infecting’ and sometimes killing other lifeforms such as birds and cows, before spreading to humans. Kate concludes that the pattern is attempting to communicate with humans, ignorant to the harm that it is causing them. She locks herself in the observatory and spends the vast majority of the story attempting to communicate with it. During this time, Stephen becomes convinced that the pattern is a deadly threat capable of destroying the human race.