Dear Esther was an interesting experimental PC game which was a first person adventure with almost no puzzles, just exploration. Developer The Chinese Room, headed by Dan Pinchbeck, has announced the spiritual successor to the adventure game, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
Like Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture will be a first person exploration game, but will instead take place in a detailed location, the village of Shropshire, instead of a series of caves. The game, which will run on the CryEngine 3 engine, will allow players to interact with the environment as well.
The game is also timed, taking place an hour before the end of the world, which will be represented in real-time. The map takes 20 minutes to traverse from one corner to its opposite, and players generally won’t be able to explore the entire map in one playthrough.
What you do during the interactions, however, will affect and influence the environment, other characters and their actions.
The characters won’t be human beings either. According to Pinchbeck, ”They’re almost kind of memory traces of people that were there. How we represent them, and whether we do full-on character builds or whether we do something more symbolic, we’re still kind of chewing around with.”
He added that players will be telling their own story in their head as well. ”I think with Esther you generated most of that sense of foreboding pretty much by yourself, and I really wanted a world where you actively feel like something is going on, because it actively is going on,” Pinchbeck stated.
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture will be released on PC sometime in 2013.
