'Everybody's Gone to The Rapture' for PlayStation 4 Arriving Aug. 11

By Liezl Dunuan, Christian Post Contributor Monday, June 15, 2015

A different kind of video game is coming exclusively to the PlayStation 4 and it's called "Everybody's Gone to the Rapture." Developed by independent game developer The Chinese Room, it will be released on August 11.

The video game is different because it challenges traditional gaming conventions, to a point that some critics are even saying that it should not be called a video game.

According to a report in Polygon, the game is an "introspective post-apocalyptic game" that challenges gaming conventions by taking away "traditional mechanics" from the game world. The game's creative director Dan Pinchbeck described it as "heavily story-driven."

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The game is set 31 years into the future, after the end of the world. It follows the story of the residents of the remote English valley of Yaughton who are "experiencing world-shattering occurrences" they cannot comprehend or understand. Players are allowed to create their own stories by going on adventures in an open world. Players also get to choose when, how many and how they will go on adventures.

According to another report in Tech Times, the game presents "a non-linear, open-world experience that pushes innovative interactive storytelling." Throughout the game, players need to piece together memories of different people in the valley in order to find out how they lived and how they died and eventually explain what happened to people in the valley. What the player hears and sees in the valley is nearly as important as what the player does while playing the game. In the end, one player's story can be very different from another player's story.

Pinchbeck also shared this about the game's development:

"We look back now at the number of story-driven, exploration-driven games that have been produced since and that's an incredible thing to be part of. We stand alongside studios and developers who are committed to pushing at the boundaries of what games can be, and that's being part of a tradition as old as gaming itself. This medium has always been about those boundaries, that pushing out, that bending and breaking of rules to do new things, and we hope Everybody's Gone to the Rapture will earn its place in that."

The game's developer, The Chinese Room, is also the developer of a similar story-telling first-person art game "Dear Esther" which was released in 2008.