You can tell from a screenshot or three that Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is either something you're going to want to swim in for hours, or avoid like whatever pachinko machine Konami are parping out next. Let's go with the former though, as developers The Chinese Room make no bones about creating something that genuinely asks you to invest quite a bit of time in its concept to get any reward, and if you do, the end results are staggering. See, the entire appeal of wandering through the English West-Midland countryside (Shropshire, to be exact) is to unravel what happened by inspecting every last pixel of content. Why are distressed voices coming from phones and being left on answering machines? What is the titular 'rapture' everyone's 'gone' to? What's the ball of light that's guiding you around, and who are you playing as in all of this? The game plays its hand very slowly (literally, you walk incredibly slowly throughout) but it's in service of drinking in the sumptuously realised English flora and fauna around you. Set-pieces and dialogue interactions happen in certain places as a spectral aura of the village's inhabitants occasionally shows you what was their last moments, and it's in how you take these in and connect the dots that makes Rapture such a unique little gem.
