Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture Past The Half-Way Point, Beautiful New Stills Released

The Chinese Room — the studio behind Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs and the wonderful, haunting adventure Dear Esther — has offered an update on its latest title, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, which is now comfortably past the half-way point in development.

News comes by way of the studio’s blog, which detailed some of the work that’s going into perfecting the atmospheric feel of the story along with creating the game’s setting — 1980s England, in this case.

“There’s a lot of backwards and forwards during this process, especially on a game that’s not delivering its story in a linear, corridor fashion. There are six major areas in the game, each of them needing a distinct identity whilst hanging together as a coherent whole, and getting that right needs in-depth iterations between design, audio and art.”

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is, in essence, a first-person adventure title that bears semblance to Dear Esther — one which orbits around a non-linear narrative. As the title suggests, The Chinese Room’s latest will take place during an apocalypse and will filter its ethereal experience through six different character within six distinct, decimated areas. Players look set to be given much more agency relative to the company’s previous efforts, and will be able to manipulate the environment around them, subsequently having a direct impact on the final outcome of the story.

We understand that The Chinese Room will release Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture exclusively for PlayStation 4 at some point in 2015. For now, you can catch an early look of some of the wonderful, autumnal environments in the gallery below.