The Impact Factor

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Running, and the Need for More Time

Perspectives

Welcome back to The Impact Factor everyone. Got a quick surprise Perspectives piece for you all! This is a story that’s been developing pretty quickly, so by the time this gets posted some of my issues may have already been resolved. Still, I had some thoughts and wanted them posted. So here we go!

Yesterday developer The Chinese Room released their anticipated new title for PS4 Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The Chinese Room is fairly well known for making experiences that stray from industry-standard gameplay conventions. Their first major release, Dear Ester, was one of the first of several games to be labeled a “walking simulator.” This is a pejorative term used to describe first person experiences in which the primary objective of the player is to explore the game world rather than shoot enemies, wield a sword, or solve puzzles. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is the studio’s newest “walking simulator.” You play as a character who has seemingly survived a biblical rapture and is now tasked with exploring a small desolate British village in hopes to find some clues as to what’s transpired. 

Welcome to the Rapture. It's quite lovely.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was met with a mixed critical reception. Much like their other two titles, Dear Ester and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, several reviewers took issue with various aspects of The Chinese Room’s newest title. The main sticking point of several reviews, however, was that movement was painfully slow. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’s main gameplay mechanic is walking around and exploring a compelling setting, so the complaint is certainly a fair one. If it takes too long to get from point A to point B with ostensibly “nothing happening” in between, I can see the frustration. Moving painstakingly slow through a sprawling world could be a serious concern if systems weren’t in place to alleviate the issue.

Negative reviews can be such a bummer. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a game I was looking forward to for quite a while. The way The Chinese Room designs their games allows them to create unique narrative storytelling and world building that’s organic, interesting, and is unique to games. Exploration-determinate narratives can be phenomenal. You don’t need to look any further than Gone Home by Fullbright Games to see how exceptional it can be. So when I heard that the slow walk speed of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture impacted this immersion, and frustrated many respected reviewers, it damped my enthusiasm.

Gone Home was one of 2013's best. It made me so excited
to play more first-person exploration games.

When I woke up Tuesday morning, after many of the reviews had already been posted, I came across this piece on KillScreen. Turns out Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture has a sprint button. You can run. No review I read mentioned this functionality. And you know what? It turns out most didn’t even know it existed. This is a pretty big issue.

Part of the issue arises that, in their rush to get the game fully functional and out in reviewer hands, The Chinese Room had neglected to mention the hold R2 to run functionality. Fine. It seems strange to me that none of the reviews I read were able to come across the system, though. Clayton Purdom, author of the KillScreen article, touches briefly on why this might have been the case. “I confess that in my more frustrated moments I gave all the shoulder triggers a shot, and presumed whatever increase in speed I witnessed to be hallucinatory. (It’s the type of game where you frequently think you’re seeing things)”. I can see his point. In an official Ask Me Anything on Reddit, The Chinese Room also stated that they were going for a realistic movement speed in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. This means that not only is walking speed “slow,” but when running the player might move slower than they have come to expect from other games. Purdom touches on this phenomenon, too. “The average running speed of even a moderately paced first-person game, like Destiny, is an absolute sprint, an all-out tear, closer to the way a real person would move on a dirtbike.” So perhaps reviewers did try holding R2, but due to the nature of the game’s world and the slower than expected pace they didn’t notice it.

 

Listen to the light. It's telling you, "Hold R2 to run."

This raised a couple flags for me, though. As a scientist, I’m all about testing. And not discovering the sprint functionality screams lack of thoroughness to me. When working in science, you must constantly push yourself to find evidence. You never take anything to be true (or “real”) without tons of supporting evidence. You can never know something doesn’t work until you know something doesn’t work. That’s dozens of hours and many tests later. I often take that experimental mindset to games. The first thing I do is to test out all my buttons, in all potential combinations. Sure, the game often tells me what does what, but there’s so much more than that. I know “X” is jump, but if I press it longer do I jump higher? What’s the best rate to press it to optimize speed jumping? What’s the height and distance? I do this all the time. It’s hard to know if I would have discovered that R2 is sprint. Running is generally mapped to holding down a stick (L3, usually). But I sure know that I would have done some serious testing to see if I can come across any kind of running functionality.

I’m sure many of the reviewers whose writing I read would have done the same too, given enough time. For many reviewers, though, there’s simply not enough time to gain a mastery of the game they’re tasked with reviewing. This whole emerging story of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and the unknown run button speaks more to the stupid need to get Day 0 reviews out. Reviewers often get copies late. This creates an enormous time crunch to start the game, understand its systems, beat the game, and write an interesting review. Thoroughness is often lost in the process. Like Purdom suggests in his article, I absolutely feel that we need to move more towards a “provincial” review system. Online functionality has been a determining factor in several outlets giving placeholder reviews for new games, since you never know what playing on retail severs will be like. But perhaps this should be expanded to all kinds of games. If the reviewer doesn’t get enough time to really understand the game, it should be noted. Obviously an ideal solution is getting the game in reviewer hands sooner, but I understand how that’s not always possible. A provincial review system would give people time to test and experiment with the game. Give them that informed opinion I as a scientist constantly seek out and work for. Time and critical analysis always draws the best conclusions, in my experience.

Be skeptical of what you read. Always. And I’m now more excited than ever to jump into Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.