The Chinese Room has peeled back the curtain on the launch trailer for its upcoming first-person exploration title, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, which offers up a beautiful, yet eerily isolated vignette of the end of the world.
Taking place in rural England, the studio’s indie experience has players explore a dinky village where the residents have suddenly vanished. Set in the 1980s – a time before instant communication was considered the norm – the idyllic Shropshire is cut off from the rest of the world for all intents and purposes, leaving you to piece together voice messages and wayward messages in order to find the reasoning behind the mass exodus.
What separates Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture from its genre contemporaries, though, is that here humanity has seemingly gone out on a whimper, rather than a bang. Couple this with the hair-raising orchestral score and you have one of PlayStation 4’s more intriguing indie experiences.
According to The Chinese Room, Rapture will give players the ability to control six unique characters, each bringing their own account of d0omsday to the table. From here on, it’s up to you to make sense of the decidedly non-linear story, and much like Dear Esther before it, Rapture‘s narrative can be shaped through your own choices. In fact, the latest trailer does offer up some new details for the story, with two characters bickering about something that has evidently gone awry, along with a woman citing some form of numerical sequence at the end. Could it be a scientific test has went off the rails?
All will be revealed when Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture graces PlayStation 4 on August 11.
