# so what if everybody's gone to the rapture > when i watch a film or play a garme i am viewing someone's creation and i expect that someone to have something to say and say it clearly. if i want to create my own stories i have my mind and i can do a much better job for myself without having to pay for it > ~ player orion only single player summary: oh the heartfelt simplicity. oh the cruel beauty the apparent all-encompassing universality of the message the superlative majesty of its metaphysical imaginary cleverly counterpointing the poetry of.. whatever this paltry rambling sim is about. what's the run key again? this sad story begins with the end of remotely challenging play: a needlessly (if perhaps necessarily) biting examination of a bland self-sustaining hype train garmes critic circle-jerk of a pseudo-garme gimmick; a toothless tech demo for bland environment graphics - and little else analytical dissection by robert what who wished they'd thought of it first // video here "thought provoking experiences that have a lasting impact on the player." oh yeah *cough* undoubtedly "everybody's gone to the rapture" perfectly describes the limitless industry hype and gushing pre-reviews being spewed forth about it; it's far more about how we're 'correctly' meant to relate to it than whatever it purports it's about this particular title by developers the chinese room has the warm gentle summer's day perfume and gloss of mild intellectual and philosophical dishonesty - a generally superficial vanity project funded by (and for) leather elbow patched academic ludonauts it's like one of ir yearly internal organizational releases passed around the offices and dark halls with well-practised hushed reverential tones by monks and never intended for mass production - which somehow leaked out to become a ps4 exclusive (perhaps some doubtless wit at the boarding school for real / serious garmes thought it would be a wizard wheeze to actually charge money for it) the real reason it's a ps4 exclusive is perhaps not because the scale of everyone's supposedly grand narrative demands a certain high level of fiscal investment in order to 'tell the tale as it needs to be told' - but simply because there's more cynical cash to be made by dealing with evil hypercorporations; the so-called story of apocalyptic ascension is irrelevant and arbitrary - especially when compared to the potential reputation for serious video garmes / hard cash to be further gained for the developers while it's uncertain exactly what they've been smoking in the chinese room judging from what dan "fool's gold" pinchbeck and jessica curry said in ir ign exclusive - entirely to themselves it seemed - everyone's gone sounds like a cheerless largely pointless exercise in ivory garming tower self love - an endlessly self-referential paean to one's own "immensely clever garme design" check out what they say about it specifically how they say it. it's like listening to a mom n' pops team feeling overly pumped about ir cyborg infant's first bowel movement - and there's nothing anyone can say to convince them of its inherent deeply auto-meaningful qualities note how they want players to correctly pre-read teh garme - how to 'frame' it correctly before consumption. ir marking spiel is all about woolly deliberately indeterminate (industry) terms like 'immersion' 'emotions' 'trusting the garmer' (??) and 'engaging with the content' - with the distinct indistinctly snooty implication being that anybody who doesn't love it is automatically a mountain dew huffing counter strike morlock that's never read a book > we've had as many emails from teenage boys as we have from the 'garmes intelligensia,' because (dear esther) was a human story > ~ garme director jessica curry hedging ir bets what exactly was human(tm) about it? it's as though everyone's dead bored has ignored all other (interesting) conversations about modern garme and narrative design not because it simply wants to travel in other unexplored directions but because it's merely a bad listener and proudly displays a false sense of its own heaven-inspired righteousness as true digital art - all encompassing and knowing in its scope all mouth and no trousers in short a hollow shell garme a bland simulacrum of philosophical knowledge dressed up in golden cgi robes of serious safe culturally sanctioned play (caption id="attachment_36302" align="aligncenter" width="656") there's no there there: everyone's gone to the rapture (and left progressive digital storytelling behind)(/caption) yet peel back the vainglorious sheen of humble that nobody's left shrouds itself in and it's simply gone home for baby jebus - an updated highly sterile version of that lump of violently overrated naval video fluff "dear dead esther" - a guided virtual tour around some infinitely dull entirely natural english village - with a deliberately slow walk speed for the purposes of padding out content and barely disguised audio logs. it's life as one long cutscene as effortless and frictionless as a gentle space walk note however the player's 'choice' to stop and smell the narrative flowers - or walk on by (probably in search of more interesting things to do) is barely an argument for nor an automatic expression of open and progressive narrative design this is surely not the way evoking narrative was supposed to end. imaginatively unimaginative and duller than accurately rendered ditch water - with nice particle effects natch. "heard the good news my friend?" yeah - dan's disappeared up ir own design rapture again everyone's gone: modern non-storytelling - for those in the know. no doubt it will get the solid reviews it deserves from the (correct) garme gods - but at least players will be able to play it through watching a hd no commentary walkthrough on loltube **update patch**: a simple thought experiment for everyone's gong // video here many online have said such garmes would be better - whatever that means - featuring or starring (to roughly paraphrase teh internets) 'zombie lesbian dinosaurs that shoot lasers from ir eyes' well what if teh garme wasn't a ps4 exclusive but available on pc and linux and actively allowed community modding? what would the implication be for teh garme's ideologically 'pure' self image? one guess would be that such a modded version would immediately be no less devoid of philosophical meaning - and that this is precisely the true danger for 'rapture attak'. not that modding and adding 'more pew-pew' would trivialize this mighty weighty cultural product.ion - but that it might simply render fully visible rapture's plain po-faced intellectual absurdities and common plastic humility heck for a better free version of exactly the same garme simply boot up trihaywbfrfyh instead **update patch**: rapture's sprintgate > a couple of weeks before teh garme went to final santa monica did a last round of playtesting. at this point teh garme included an autosprint. that meant that if you kept moving you'd gradually ramp up to a run speed specifically to deal with issues with how long potential back-tracking could take given teh garme's non-linearity. the problem was playtesters wanted to be able to trigger it themselves. it didn't matter about the speed it was the psychology the choice > ~ dan pinchbeck a few bumps on landing developer dan pinchbeck's spineless 'mea culpa' blog post describes the apparent lack of - but *always actually available* - sprint function in ir garme as 'a few bumps on landing'. hardly dan. rather this seems just a deliberate and wilful obfuscation on the part of the chinese room regarding an already-existing sprint function directly illustrating how they themselves (along with every other researcher/player on earth) clearly understand and automatically acknowledge the true inherent mind shearing tedium of ir sapless walking simulator. but the chinese room just ignored ir plight - or simply had no imagination to think of anything better passing the very rigorous console certification process is no mean feat for any developer. either a chunk of code - say a sprint function - is part of a garme's submitted code base or it is not. to attempt to suggest it was a mere oversight on one's part not to inform players of its (strictly accounted-for) existence is dubious to say the least the correct way to 'deal with issues with how long potential back-tracking could take' could have been to question the whole idea of rapture as a (dodgy) concept. you can bet every single one of those poor play testers who knew of the sprint function used it 100% of the time - it certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with "psychology" or teh garme's faintly pseudo 'non-linearity' in the future awesomepocalypse "everyone's gone to the rapture" will no doubt be used by seriously uncool 'your-dad-like' video garme tutors to showcase when ign laughably terms "(..) a non-linear open-world experience that pushes innovative interactive storytelling to the next level" - while everyone in class quietly rolls ir eyes and dreams of anything better than rapture's dead museum exhibit **update patch** 2 everyone's gone to the rapture already has its own parody review (via garmespot) // republic of bob