Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

While the short-fingered vulgarian is holding commissions trying to determine if the nation's epidemic of gun violence can't somehow be blamed on violent video games (spoiler alert: it can't), I completed a very unusual video game today that had absolutely no violence.  It does involve the end of the world so there's that, but no violence.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a first-person, open-world, apocalyptic sci-fi game where the player explores a small English town mysteriously devoid of all residents, discovering clues about what happened and what lead to everybody suddenly disappearing (and no, despite the title, it wasn't due to the Biblical Rapture).  The clues are obtained from brief bits of radio chatter, intercepted telephone conversations, and echoes of conversations past.  The story of what happened to the village is very complex and original, and the clues are not obtained in anything close to chronological order, so it takes a lot of concentration and imagination to put the whole thing together.  No spoilers here, but I will say that it involves an epidemic and associated quarantine, the social hierarchy of a small British village, and an extraterrestrial intelligence that can travel through electrical wires. 

It's probably the most beautiful game I've played, due both to the incredible, almost painterly, visuals and to the lovely soundtrack.  It was also one of the most frustrating, because all you can do as the player for the whole game is walk around and passively collect clues.  Literally, all you do the whole game is just walk - no clobbering zombies with fire axes, no guns or sword play, not even any looting - nothing but walking and watching.  And there is no option to save the game at a time of the player's choosing - game saves come automatically at the end of "chapters" and there are times when I was forced to decide if I wanted to quit playing and lose 40-minutes-plus of progress, and other times when the game auto-saved and I had to ask myself if I wanted to quit then and there before I made any more progress, or keep playing until whenever the next auto-save occurred.

Despite those frustrations, it was still an interesting experience, and I finished the whole game, start to end, in about 8 hours.  The story's complex enough and the clues sufficiently non-linear that I know I'm going to eventually play the game through again to better understand the significance of some of the clues and the full meaning of some of those fragments of conversations.  It's not unlike one of those non-linear movies like Memento or Babel where you don't "get it" until the end, and then want to watch it through again now that you understand.

So if you want to play a game where you can exercise the mind as well as the reflexes, and appreciate the creative artistry and obvious hard work of the creators, you might like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. If all you want to do in a game is shoot people and avoid getting shot yourself, then you might want to pass.  Your call.