Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (2016) (PC) (The Chinese Room)
0British developer The Chinese Room's somber mood piece, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, is now available on PC. When I played through the Playstation 4 version last year I felt it lacked the mystery and haunting qualities of the developer's first game, Dear Esther, which had a similar structure but a more esoteric and literary style. EGR was still an enthralling experience in its own right, however, and ultimately proved memorable enough to stick with me for the rest of 2015 - and not just by virtue of having a jaw-droppingly amazing soundtrack by Jessica Curry.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a story about character just as much as it's a narrative with characters in it. The game's sleepy countryside community - with its gossiping neighbors, romantic entanglements and family feuds - is a setting that lends itself to melodrama, and, in so doing, invites an essentially moralistic reading of the disembodied has-beens which the player spends his or her time eavesdropping on during the course of the story. Though constantly engaged in dialogue and argument with themselves and others, their actions in face of the unnervingly quiet apocalypse happening all around them frequently speak louder than words.
All the actors on the virtual stage are faced with the same dire existential threat and go through the same initial phases of disbelief, shock and bewilderment, but it's what happens next - when the end truly draws near - that defines them. Some deny the truth, most try to escape, others resign themselves to the inevitable, a few fret over the possibility for redemption and many rage at the dying of the light (or the light of dying, as it were). However, there are also those who - as demonstrated in the game's most moving scenes - focus their attention on alleviating the suffering of others. The hand they were dealt - whether by meaningless chance, cruel fate, alien science or perhaps the whims of an inscrutable deity with a weakness for theatrics - was just as miserable as everyone else's, but they did the bloody best they could and thus made a difference, if only for a little while.
And if the game has any religious message (as an admittedly too literal and simplistic interpretation of the title would seem to suggest) beyond its vague and rather unsatisfying sci-fi trappings, it would be that such acts of selfless devotion to one's fellow human beings is what will truly echo in eternity, long after the chattering ghosts of light have faded away from a village that God remembered to forget.