Everybody's Gone to the Rapture isn't the kind of game that's going to give you precisely all of the answers you want, but what it provides should satisfy those who are driven by the mystery above all else.

The finale, at least, was worth the trouble.

This didn't have anything to do with a review embargo I had plenty of time to play and finish the game, I just got so exhausted by how sluggish it was. By the time I was a few hours in, I found myself beelining in whatever direction I thought was the end of the game. More than anything, the slow pace of movement in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture feels at odds with the game's apparent goal of encouraging players to explore and take everything in. Or, in a smaller number of instances, the light will float there, waiting, as the game's sound is overtaken by a sort of radio static. When you approach them, they might fly away, urging you to chase after, or they might suddenly take human form and begin playing out a flashback, giving you another piece of the puzzle of what went down in Yaughton. As you explore, you'll come across little balls of light. That last mechanic, the tilt functionality, is the most interesting and offers the earliest hints at what happened here.

The game employs a grand total of four inputs: the two analog sticks to move and look around, the ‘x' button to interact with a small handful of things in the environment and the PlayStation 4 controller's tilt functionality. As you might expect from the minds behind Dear Esther, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is mechanically minimal. The goal of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is to explore Yaughton and discover what happened to the village. It's an idyllic location, all picturesque farmsteads and homey small-town inns, save for one defining feature: The entire population of Yaughton has disappeared. You soon discover that you're in the area surrounding a rural British village, a locale known as Yaughton Valley.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture begins by dropping the player - as an unnamed first-person-view source - into a pastoral field.

Everyone goes to the rapture download