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[PS4] Everybody's Gone to the Rapture


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Hi there, we’re Dan and Jessica, Co-Directors of The Chinese Room. We’re based in Brighton, on the south coast of the UK. We made a game called Dear Esther for PC last year that was a first-person story-driven exploration and mystery title. It was all about immersion and emotion, rather than having lots of complex gameplay, and was slow and poetic, with a really strong emphasis on the quality of the production – music, art, writing, voice-over.


It was one of the breakout indie hits of 2012, gathering up a whole bag of international awards and shifting over three quarters of a million copies. We were left thinking “how do you follow that?”

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, our new game, is our attempt to answer that question, and I want to tell you a little about it.

Like Dear Esther, the new game is all about the story. It uses simple gameplay – basic exploration of a first-person world – so it’s very friendly to people without a lot of game experience. But it’s not casual in the classic sense – this is a deep and immersive game.

It’s all about the end of the world. You play the role of a scientist, trapped in the very second of the apocalypse, and the game is about discovering what has happened. You do this by exploring a large open-world environment, and interacting with the objects, places and people you find to gradually unlock and put together the story.

There’s also a really cool thing you can do which makes the game really different and makes this process of exploring the story something you could only do in a game, but we’re keeping that secret for now. Expect a reveal about that in due course, but we’re very excited about it and can’t wait to show it off.

When we started making Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, we knew we wanted to make a console title. We also knew that Sony were committed to pushing really interesting indie and experimental work, and figured they’d be into the ideas we were putting together. In a completely idealistic and high risk move, we forgot about the idea of a Plan B, put together a prototype and approached Sony Santa Monica. They were just shipping Journey and Unfinished Swan and we thought we’d have a lot in common in terms of ideas about story, gameplay, player experience.

So what can you expect? Well, we can promise you that Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture will be powerful and deep, highly immersive and with an absolute focus on your emotional journey through the world. It’s non-linear, with a dynamic and adaptive environment, so this is about your story, a really individual experience that breaks away from the on-rails nature of lots of story-driven games into something that you have a visible impact on.

We’ve got a brilliant team of developers here, most of whom have come straight from AAA production and have worked on some of the best games to come out of the UK in recent years. As studio heads, it’s inspiring to look at the talent and experience on the team and more than anything, it makes us confident we’re making a really great game for you.

We’ll be introducing them over on the studio blog at www.thechineseroom.co.uk/blog over the next few weeks as we really kick into full production, and sharing more information about the game with you here as things develop. For now, we just want to say “hello” and let you know how unbelievably excited we are to be here, making this thing for you. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

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I've seen some sites reporting that the game was "newly announced" today which isn't true at all, the title of the game has been known for at least a year. This Eurogamer article is from July 2012:

First-person thinker Dear Esther's developer The Chinese Room has revealed numerous details about its upcoming CryEngine 3 PC game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.

Studio head Dan Pinchbeck spilled the beans to Beefjack, explaining that it's an open-world first-person non-combat game set in rural Shropshire an hour before the world ends.

The game will transpire in real-time across a large terrain that should take approximately 20 minutes to traverse diagonally. Whatever you don't accomplish in 60 minutes can be discovered upon subsequent playthroughs.

Unlike in Dear Esther, you'll be able to interact with the world this time around. Your interactions will influence the environment, characters and their actions.

"I think with Esther you generated most of that sense of foreboding pretty much by yourself, and I really wanted a world where you actively feel like something is going on, because it actively is going on," Pinchbeck explained.

There will be six characters, though it's unclear if these will even be people. "They're almost kind of memory traces of people that were there," Pinchbeck said. "How we represent them, and whether we do full-on character builds or whether we do something more symbolic, we're still kind of chewing around with."

Besides Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, The Chinese Room is working on the Amnesia sequel Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs due out on PC next year.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is slated for a 2013 release. For now, check out these mesmerising first images.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-30-dear-esthers-spiritual-successor-everybodys-gone-to-the-rapture-detailed

In fact, I think this PS4 exclusivity deal is the reason why we haven't heard more about it since. I remember browsing thechineseroom's webste and there was a page dedicated to Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, with pictures and a description. Now the page just says "Current Game" with this message:

"We are currently in development on a new title. We can’t tell you any more about this right now, but should be releasing some more information in late summer. We’re very excited about it."

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  • 9 months later...
The Chinese Room shared a new trailer for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, its upcoming PlayStation 4 story-driven adventure game, at E3.

Rapture is set in the remote valley of Yaughton in June 1984, an follows a story about people and how they live with each other, but also about the end of the world. The world itself is described as its own character, rather than just a backdrop.

“Rapture also came from our obsession with post-apocalyptic gaming, and the simple idea that whilst we normally play as the hero, in reality, most of us would be the piles of ash and bone littering the game world,” co-director Jessica Curry said on the PlayStation Blog. “That’s an interesting place to start telling a story.”

It’s a game all about discovery, where you can explore wherever you like, visiting places in the order you’d like, and making sure every player has a “strong dramatic” story experience.

Music and audio will play a fundamental role in achieving this, Curry, who is also the composer, said. Over at the PlayStation Blog, you can hear one of the tracks from the game.

http://gematsu.com/2014/06/everybodys-gone-rapture-e3-2014-trailer-screenshots

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  • 9 months later...
IGN has gone up with a 13-minute gameplay video of The Chinese Room and SCE Santa Monica Studios External’s Everbody’s Gone to the Rapture, currently in development for PlayStation 4.
The clip comes as part of this month’s IGN First. It features commentary from creative director Dan Pinchbeck and composer Jessica Curry. Later this week, the outlet will have an interview with the pair, who discuss more about the game’s “unique emotional storytelling” and how music is being used to support the narrative.
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture tells a story that begins with the end of the world. There are no wastelands, no mutants, and all of the game’s events unfold in a peaceful English village, whose inhabitants have disappeared, leaving you to find out why.

http://gematsu.com/2015/03/13-minutes-of-everybodys-gone-to-the-rapture-gameplay

Video in link.

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  • 5 weeks later...
  • 3 months later...
Dear Esther developer The Chinese Room has released a new trailer for its latest mystery opus Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, due 11th August on PS4.
As stated on the PlayStation Blog, it will go for $19.99, but PS Plus members will receive a 20 per cent discount on pre-orders. A dynamic desktop theme will also come with all copies of Rapture purchased worldwide during its first two weeks on sale.
The Chinese Room recently revealed the game's cast, which includes Merle Dandridge (Alyx Vance in Half Life 2 and Marlene in The Last of Us) as Dr Katherine Collins, a central figure in the game's mystery.
If you're thirsting for more clues regarding the game's enigmatic story, the developer has uploaded all sorts of tantalising nuggets on the game's official site, including leaflets, journal entries, and audio excerpts from Collins and her research assistant and husband, Dr. Stephen Appleton.
For more on Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, I interviewed its co-director Dan Pinchbeck last year at E3. "Like The Chinese Room's previous efforts, not everyone will get it, but a certain type of player will find its quaint end-of-the-world drama rich in emotional nourishment," I wrote in my Everybody's Gone To The Rapture preview.

http://youtu.be/3rY-u-OYk8Q

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