Everybody's Gone to the Rapture has precisely 2 things going for it: It's a very pretty game, and it's the perfect example of how not to do a walking simulator.

The thing about walking simulators is that they are games with very limited mechanics, sometimes so limited that the only action you have as a player is walking around an environment (see: Dear Esther). Had the vast majority of games been boiled down to this, they would be considered awful games, and rightly so. Even in a non-interactive medium such a movies, there is still *stuff* happening. So for a walking simulator to be more engaging, you need something else to engage with: a detailed and interesting world to explore, a deep and enriching story, a mystery to unravel etc.

This game has none of that. To start with, the game is called "Everybody's Gone to the Rapture", so that mystery is solved before you even enter the store-page. But has *literally* everybody's gone to the rapture? Well, would you be willing to play through the entire game just to find out? No? Moot point then, innit? And while the world is very pretty, it cannot be described as interesting, unless you're an alien wondering what a bog standard English village looks like, although you could probably save yourself a lot of time by simply googling that.

So that's 2 strikes so far, what about gameplay? Well, beside the bare minim movement keys, you also get an interact key for, uhm… Opening doors, and… Turning on radios… aaand the secondary interact key for triggering one type of voice overs… Oh, and a sprint key! Well, sprint is too generous, it's more like a powerwalk key- actually that's still too generous, it's more like a I'm-running-2-minutes-late-for-a-lunch-meeting key. It's very slow. On purpose.

It's understandable that the developers want players to take their time contemplating the story and exploring the environment, but with a pace this slow, you'll sooner zone out in boredom and feel punished for taking a wrong turn than mentally engage with this absolute crawl. It's not like an actual sprint key would have made people think they were the Doomguy, though even if it did, would that be so bad?

And the story is, well, pretty much what it says in the title: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and through playing the game and listening to the various bits of voice overs you learn more about the rapture and the people going to it. You learn that the rapture isn't simply people being smote by god, and that some of the people had interpersonal conflicts with each other… And that's pretty much it. There's no secret cult, no a meth lab to be discovered, no government experiments being ran, just normal people being disappeared by space magic. As far as I can tell, there's no deeper meaning to the story either, no moral takeaways, no philosophical questions being asked, just a very simple story plainly told

I mean, don't get it twisted, there have very much been walking simulators done right. What Remains of Edith Finch for example: lots of environmental storytelling, varied gameplay, mystery of what happened to the family etc. Or the Stanley Parable: literally takes place within an office rendered in the Half Life 2 engine, so an aggressively boring game to look at, but with a narrative structure that keeps you playing through the game over and over just to see how the story plays out. There is so much you can do with so many limitations, yet The Chinese Room seem completely uninterested in exploring any of those possibilities.

The only amusement I managed to wring from the experience was from deliberately leaving all the lights and electronics on and imagining everyone at some point returning to a shocking electricity bill. Unfortunately, it was't enough to redeem the experience for me. Cannot recommend