Watch Joaby's full video review from his YouTube channel embedded above
What people are talking about when they declare something a Walking Simulator are the popular narrative-focused games where the player meanders through a game-world learning more about it as they go. The player interacts by looking and learning, and forward momentum is acquired directly via forward momentum. In Gone Home, you find notes from their sister. You arrive home and you experience a person's life as well you might by walking into a vacationing family's home and ruffling through their shit. It's endearing thanks to strong, absent characterisation and fairly solid plotting, and so people connect with the house, the characters and the game itself.

I could see what there was to like about Gone Home as much as I could see what people disliked.

This is not the case with Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. It redefines the concept of the Walking Simulator. Ignoring the hilarious instance where the game's creators forgot to tell anyone about the 'walk slightly faster' button, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture appears to unlearn decades of knowledge about interactivity, narrative storytelling and even optimisation.

It's a Goddamn mess.



When people derisively accuse a game of being a Walking Simulator, they're talking about a sense that the player's involvement in the game is unnecessary. In Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, I'd go further than this -- the player's involvement is an imposition that the creators at The Chinese Room couldn't work out a solution to. The idea is that in a Walking Simulator game the player could be successfully replaced by an on-rails camera and the end result would be the same. I didn't feel that this was the case in Gone Home. I always felt that my involvement was a necessity, and clever level design resulted in tension, a sense of discovery and an overall feeling of involvement.

In Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, I don't feel that the end result would be the same either. I feel like a camera on-rails would result in a net positive for the game. I don't feel it unnecessary to the advancement of the plot, I feel like I am actively hampering it.

Every moment I spend in the game I feel like I am learning to dislike it more. As a game, it involves you walking -- painfully slowly -- through the English town of Shropshire discovering what happened to all the people. You occasionally happen upon some glowing gold lights, and they recreate memories of the townsfolk who were going about their business as their world was coming to an end.

It feels like an apocalyptic version of A Country Practice or Emmerdale, where the residents of this sleepy English township go through the motions of their lives, unaware of their imminent demise. It's compelling in the same way that soap operas often are -- character conflict creates drama for invested viewers to keep track of, all the while remaining familiar enough to be relatable to your own struggles. In the case of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, these conflicts are related to the overarching theme of spirituality, but they're made relatable through common elements like petty power struggles, gossip and loss.



Through complex and detailed characterisation Everybody's Gone hopes to give you a reason to continue exploring the world it has created as you unravel the secrets which lie within -- what happened to all the people? Where did they all go? Who am I, beyond being a disembodied floating form? It's the Stephen King approach -- character complexity is derived from an overload of information, resulting in a sensation that you really know the characters. Unfortunately for Everybody's Gone, this approach doesn't work. King's approach appeals to people's baser instincts, using sex and violence to hook readers into thinking they're learning intimate secrets about the role-players in his stories -- the best The Chinese Room manage is a man who has a drink with an ex.

Worse is the fact that the people are recreated with glowing shapes, and they're often indistinguishable. If I hadn't put subtitles on, I'd have never been able to determine Father Jeremy from Dr, because they sound too much alike. Many of the women sound too similar as well, which meant I had to rely heavily on subtitles to work out what was going on in the game's main narrative sequences. It's shocking to me that nobody ever brought up the fact that golden glowing forms are virtually indistinguishable from one another, and that perhaps the voice actors should work hard to distinguish themselves.

Everybody's Gone is a freaking mess. Any time the Golden Orbs appear indoors, the framerate shits its pants, which is a shortcut to motion sickness for many people. When people call the game pretty, they're talking stylistically -- gorgeous combinations of colours work to create a visually appealing scene every time you look around -- but there are dozens of games which look better. There are graphically more impressive games which feature complex systems working together (and against one another) which don't shit the bed as hard as Everybody's Gone does any time the main function of the game's storytelling triggers.



We've already talked about the run button, which The Chinese Room neglected to talk about at all. Their official explanation was that, at the last second, their testing told them that people preferred to trigger the ability to run themselves, and they then simply forgot to mention that they'd bound the ability to a button at all (probably because the game only uses buttons primarily as a method of interaction between the player and the game-world, tying movement and viewing to the thumbsticks and the occasional gold blob trigger to the SIXAXIS controls of the Dual Shock 4).

This claim, that they changed the run speed to a player-triggered event, makes sense, because if the running was an automatic event (like it had been originally, according to the developers) it wouldn't be so utterly jarring to have your run speed reduced to zero when you enter buildings. This is how you know the player is an inconvenience, an unwanted trespasser in The Chinese Room's creation. In order to manage a level of pacing they spent a long time putting together, they will actively remove any sense of player agency as they see fit. You're moving too fast through our game-world -- we will, for no reason, now force you to slow down.

Pacing is oh-so important in a game like this though. It's vital that Everybody's Gone to the Rapture gives you time. If they force-feed you their narrative too quickly, you'll never stop to think about it. If they take too long, you'll get bored (more bored than you already are). They need to give you just enough time to make you sit there and think "woah, what did that conversation between two yellow blobs mean? Maybe it was important? That one yellow blob seemed angry at the other one. That's probably going to be a thing later. Wow, this game is pretty deep".

Because when your game offers the player this little meaningful interaction, you need to find something else to offer them. Why not faux depth?



And rest assured, the game offers precious little meaningful interaction. You don't have to activate all the golden blob moments by waggling the controller around, just some of them. The trigger for a controller activated golden blob moment appears to be entirely arbitrary. Most interactions with the game-world are arbitrary. There are light switches that switch but don't turn on any light. There are doors that open, and others that don't. Sometimes, when a door won't open a knocking audio file or a door jiggling audio file plays but at other times nothing happens at all. For most of the game, an ajar door or gate means that gate can be opened or entered, but then you suddenly come across other doors and or gates which can't. Nothing in the game world can be picked up and looked at. There's no zoom key, so you can't look at things in more detail. They don't want you to pay attention to the details, because they never really did either

You experience this world exactly as The Chinese Room intends for you to experience it. For a game which deals so heavily in themes of faith, Everybody's Gone shows surprisingly little faith in the player. The golden orbs lead you from cut-scene to cut-scene, assuming the entire time you're unable to find these things on your own, because Everybody's Gone isn't about you discovering anything. Gone Home was endearing because it felt like each new morsel of information was something you discovered -- your detective work lead you to uncover the mysteries of the home. That's not the case here. You're not detecting anything. You go where they allow you, you see what they want you to see, you hear the audio files on tapes inexplicably dotting this sleepy English town. If the game didn't allow you to move around or look around, it would be better off. You wouldn't waste your time exploring empty houses full of superficially detailed minutiae.

The reason people notice details they otherwise don't in games like these is because by design the game reduces the player's level of interaction to the act of viewing, and so a player who strives to do "better", for whatever that term is worth, will always notice more things -- they will strive to interact with the game world as much as possible. Player's who mentally break games down to the elements they are constructed from will look for patterns in the game so that they can take the game apart. It's not petty nitpicking that sees games like Everybody's Gone suffer further scrutiny for minor missing details than your Call of Dutys -- the way we interact with games is responsible for that.



Which leads us to the only possible conclusion I can draw from this experience.

You are what's wrong with this game, dear gamer. Your existence is an affront to its majesty. It's a gorgeous town with a spectacular soundtrack, and your very presence taints it. Holy shit, I just realised. It's meta as fuck, a brilliant commentary on the nature of the relationship between the creator and those of us who experience creation. Hell, maybe it's more than that. Maybe it's a meta commentary on the nature of our relationship to God. The big guy upstairs created all of this before us so that we might bathe in His glory and you're using His infinite generosity to sit there and watch some dude bitch about a videogame on YouTube.

This is it. I'm spiralling out of control. I've been wasting my life. Everybody's Going to the Rapture except me, because I'm sitting here, pissing away my life criticising a game, and for what? Because it was contemptuous of my time? Aren't I just as contemptuous of it, sitting there, playing a game I fucking hated for six fucking hours just so I could get to the end, just so I could shit on it from my not-so-high horse? Fuck. Go outside, Joab. Go do something. You can't even walk that much faster than the floating camera thing in Everybody's Gone, so where do you get off bitching about that anyway? Do something with your life, you waste of space. What have you created? The Chinese Room might have made a game you hate, but at least they evoked some reaction from someone, you fart-knocker.

If this was The Chinese Room's intention, if they meant to create glorious meta-commentary about the nature of the game developer and the gamer, or God and all of life, or whatever, then bravo. They fucking killed it. The fact that the only games they've ever made are Walking Simulators makes this grift next-level, like the old Chinese man with the fishbowl in The Prestige.



Walking simulator as a term started as a dismissive joke, and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is the punchline, a shaggy dog effort determined to mock the idea that games need players. It's not meta. It's not clever. It's banal and tedious and if your narrative focused do-nothing game wouldn't work as a halfway interesting short story, then it won't be better just because you force people to walk slowly around a wholly un-interactive game space while you drip-feed them unconnected plot points.

PS Do not wander into a vacationing family's home and ruffle through their shit. That is literally a plot device from every serial killer movie ever.