Everybody's Gone to the Rapture – Digital Fantasy Diary

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a first-person walking sim set in the fictional village of Yaughton in the west of England. Yaughton is completely deserted, and the player’s job is to figure out what happened. “What happened” turns out to be a combination of things, none of which is ever properly explained, but what really matters is the human drama at the core of the crisis.

The game is entirely first-person, and the player can only do two things: walk and look around. There’s also an action button that can be used to turn on radios, pick up ringing phones, and enter open doors and gates, but we never see the player character’s hands. The player is thus little more than a moving point of view. This is just fine, because Yaughton is gorgeous.

After climbing down from the hill where the game starts, the player is confronted with a jumble of buildings and several intersections. Since you can go into almost every house, not to mention every house’s backyard and garage and garden shed, it was difficult for me to resist the temptation to do so. I kept encountering radios that can be turned on to get a bit of story, as well as shimmers of light that resolved into stylized representations of people sharing brief conversations.

Despite the lovely scenery, the first bit of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is fairly stagnant. The front end of the game is loaded with tons of disconnected characters whose relationship to each other isn’t immediately apparent. The light shining on the world is totally flat, and there’s no wind moving the leaves in the trees or blowing garbage across the streets.

After almost two hours of wandering around and trying to figure things out, I stopped caring about finding everything and decided to follow the glowing comet of light that’s intended to lead you through the story. What the guiding comet reveals is a series of conversations centered around a priest, Father Jeremy Wheeler, who was trying to come to terms with his faith in relation to what was happening to the town. Following a climactic scene, the game changes in a significant way.

At this point, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture becomes much more structured. The player now understands that each area of the game is the stage for a narrative focused on one character. After the first major transition, the world of the game also becomes more active, with floating pollen, falling leaves, swaying flowers, billowing air-dried laundry, and the shadows of wind moving through the trees. As the natural world comes to life, the pieces of the story gradually start coming together.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture isn’t perfect. The start of the game is extremely slow, and it’s easy to get lost at first. The guiding comet has a tendency to disappear, requiring you to restart the game to bring it back, and the slow pace of movement makes backtracking feel more annoying than it should be. Still, the graphics and music are beautiful – rapturous, even – and I was moved by the writing. If you’re patient enough to follow the story to its conclusion, your reward is an almost overwhelming sense of joy.

I should mention that I enjoyed Kirk Hamilton’s write-up of the plot (on Kotaku here), which poses many interesting questions and offers some excellent answers. The apocalyptic story seems more grim and horrific when summarized in writing than it does when you’re playing the game itself, though, so I’d recommend going in without spoilers.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a walking sim that takes about two hours to complete. It was released in April 2017 for Steam and PlayStation 4, but it’s now available on a number of other platforms, including the Nintendo Switch.

What Remains of Edith Finch is visually gorgeous, and it falls into my favorite category of games: It was created for an adult audience by a small team of developers who take full advantage of the interactive gaming medium but don’t frustrate the player with unnecessary puzzle or platforming elements. There’s a lot to explore in this game, but the atmosphere is never broken by the player having to get up and check a walkthrough.

You play as a teenage woman named Edith Finch, who is returning to her family’s house on a small island off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The house has been abandoned ever since Edith’s mother moved away in order to escape “the family curse,” which holds that everyone who is born into (or marries into) the Finch family dies in a tragic accident. In order to find closure, Edith tries to reconstruct the details of her family’s deaths, which the player experiences though a series of vignettes that play out in the form of short interactive stories.

Progression through the game is definitely on rails, but it doesn’t feel particularly linear. This is partially due to the unique architecture of the Finch house, whose rooms seem impossible yet manages to fit together neatly like the pieces of a puzzle. The game’s sense of progression is also enhanced by the player’s interactions with the environment, which are essential to the storytelling. I’m going to use the case of Edith’s older brother Lewis as an example of what I mean.

Lewis is a young man who loves fantasy novels, video games, and weed. After he graduates from high school, he drifts aimlessly for a few years before getting a job at a salmon cannery. This job is just as dreary as you might expect, but Lewis survives the tedium of menial labor by immersing himself in daydreams. As the player, you use one joystick to control the repetitive motion of decapitating fish and throwing them onto a conveyor belt while simultaneously using the other joystick to guide Lewis’s avatar through his RPG-themed fantasies.

Lewis’s daydream gradually becomes more interesting and complex. This is reflected by the game inside his mind being upgraded, almost as though it were being remastered across various eras of gaming consoles. The controls for the salmon cannery aspect of Lewis’s life never change, and they remain a constant annoyance as the fantasy slowly expands to fill the screen. When the player is jolted out of this daydream back into the bloody and poorly lit factory, it’s much more jarring than it would be if we were simply reading or watching Lewis’s story.

The psychiatrist who narrates this vignette says that Lewis’s death was caused by a hallucination triggered by withdrawal from hard drugs, but the player understands that it was a suicide brought about by his overwhelming desire to no longer be anchored by an unpleasant and unsatisfying reality. This episode is only twenty minutes long, but I cried. Kind of a lot actually.

What Remains of Edith Finch isn’t sad or sentimental; rather, it’s nuanced and incredibly beautiful. It doesn’t offer the player the same sort of transcendent experience as a more ambitious game like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, but its smaller and more personal stories are replete with mystery and wonder. Although the two games were made by different developers, What Remains of Edith Finch feels like a spiritual sequel to Gone Home, and it’s such a pleasure to see the gaming medium used to apply magical realism to gothic dramas of family ghosts and personal journeys of discovery.

I was inspired to return to What Remains of Edith Finch by a recent episode of the podcast Watch Out for Fireballs, which you can listen to (here). Reflecting on the game almost six years after it was first released, I would agree with the podcast hosts: Although What Remains of Edith Finch was almost universally praised when it came out, I’m afraid that its Wes Anderson style of twee humor might not land the same way on social media now. What Remains of Edith Finch treats the twinned subjects of death and mental illness with humor and sympathy in a way that celebrates the joys of being alive, and I’m not sure its multilayered tone would necessarily survive the black-or-white mentality of Twitter.

Still, I love this game, and I appreciate it even more now that I’ve had more personal experience with grief. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that What Remains of Edith Finch is uplifting, but the two hours I spent with the game improved my mood, bolstered my courage, and reignited my creative motivation. As with any work of art, the specificity of the game’s tone and viewpoint may not land with everyone, but it’s precisely this specificity of storytelling that makes What Remains of Edith Finch so strange and fun and interesting.