That doesn’t mean that either is predictable or linear. In any case, we’ll keep things as spoiler-free as humanly possible because, in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the game and the narrative are indistinguishable from each other. The smartest thing you could do right now is purchase and download the game, play it, then come back and read the rest. By taking inspiration from a very British vein of sci-fi, and most specifically the fifties novels of John Wyndham, the team at The Chinese Room have created a post-apocalyptic game unlike any other, as locked into a place and era as Kubrick’s 2001, the Quatermass movies or Tarkovsky’s films of Solaris and Stalker.įrankly, the less you know going in, the better. There may be odd signs that not everything is right, but this is an apocalypse where the victims appear to have quietly disappeared, leaving a radio blaring in the garden, doors unlocked, a van left open on the side of the road. A small miracle at the end of the world.It’s a very English kind of apocalypse one that takes place without much fuss or obvious violence or screaming in a quiet Shropshire valley in the mid-1980s. Still, the truth is out there now, and anyone frustrated by the speed they were forced to explore at can now avoid the sluggishness. Chances are, plenty of players experimented with holding down every button on their PlayStation 4 controllers to try to boost movement, but few would think to accelerate speed in a first person game as you would a racing title. But the most important thing is that we get the word out to players, so here we go."Īdmittedly, a slowly building sense of speed is an odd design choice. "That was a bad call, and we've paid for it in the reviews. It's in the online manual, but not at the start of the game." "We probably should have announced the run button before launch, but we didn't," Pinchbeck admits. "The controller icon in the options menu was missing the sprint instruction, and it hadn't been localised.
"Suddenly launch was right on top of us, and something had been missed," Pinchbeck says.
It hadn't, but the added time demand brought the team right up to release date, before anyone realised the user interface hadn't been updated to tell players how to launch into a sprint.
The Chinese Room then switched to the "hold R2" method, which then required another round of play-testing to make sure the late addition to controls didn't break the game. "It didn't matter about the speed, it was the psychology, the choice," says Pinchbeck. However, play testers were demanding a way to trigger faster movement themselves. Originally, the game featured autosprint - that is, keep moving with the L thumbstick and you'd gain speed.
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