An eerie new trailer and some gorgeous screenshots have dropped for upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
The trailer gives us all some sense of the narrative, but not too much as to give the entire plot line away. Developer The Chinese Room - the developer behind critically acclaimed Dear Esther - have set the game in the fictional abandoned village of Yaughton Valley in the English countryside, in which the player must uncover traces of the missing community and piece together fragments of memories to uncover the mystery.
In the trailer we hear a ominous voice speak over the radio, as we see the remnants of a classroom ravished by what appears to be something rather apocalyptic. The voice informs people to “Keep your radio and television on at all times. Stay indoors and avoid contact with other people. Do not attempt to telephone outside your local area. Do not panic, and remain civil and calm.” Good advice, for sure.
As the trailer wraps-up from its minute and a half pan, it tells somehow manages to tell the viewer both absolutely everything and absolutely nothing about the game’s plot, keeping watchers interested throughout, and anticipating what’s to come. Learning what happened within the world around you seems to be the whole point of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, in a similar way to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter did last year.
Dan Pinchbeck, co-director for The Chinese Room had some more news to share on the official PlayStation Blog. They are close to Beta stage for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture which the team is excited but nervous of.
“We’re a couple of weeks out from beta, which is incredibly exciting and quite scary in equal measure,” he says in the post. “There’s always a point in every game development where you start counting down the days and hours, and everything gears itself around the question of “right, we’re shipping this thing, are we ready?”.”
The end is just about in sight for the team. They are nit-picking small details to improve the experience as of late, as well as working on bigger stuff such as Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’s game soundtrack. The Chinese Room has extremely high hopes for it, saying that it is going to be “highlights of game music this year. Actually… better than that, it’s one of the best game soundtracks ever created.” It’s very high praise for the music team, but perhaps rightly so. In the prior linked blog post, you can hear one of the tracks created for the game, The Mourning Tree, a beautiful blend of a piano concerto, string accompaniment and a haunting operatic vocal.
Pinchbeck also revealed in the post that the launch date will be announced soon. Until then, you can view the mysterious trailer for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and marvel at the screenshots provided below.
