I'm very intrigued and affected by the "first-person walker (or runner if you really must)" Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. The gorgeous soundtrack, incredible detail and sympathetic characters -- and the tragic situation in which everyone winds up being caught and... perhaps destroyed? -- is a potent mix.
I just thought I'd just post this here for those who finish the game to agree or disagree with.
Other perspectives welcome. Have I missed anything?
I just thought I'd just post this here for those who finish the game to agree or disagree with.
It's not for nothing that Kate and Stephen work for a foundation called VALIS. The story is specifically about the subject of the Gnostic Phillip K. Dick sci-fi classic: it's about a divine invasion.
The Pattern -- infinitely lonely, infinitely adaptable, not exactly long on tact or grasp of mortality but not malicious either -- is effectively a divine consciousness that doesn't grasp the constraints of the flesh. It's an illustration of the wonder, the terror, and the tragedy of being granted the opportunity to see God firsthand. And the story is a specific theological take on what that means.
Which is to say that what that means is complicated. Everyone in the game's story -- at least among the major players through whose viewpoints we see everything -- is led to confront specific inner demons and try to find some measure of peace. All of them are fully human and flawed characters, not always likeable but always comprehensible and always real and with their own specific roles to play.
Some of them get the benefit of what seems to be a final revelation of peace and hope, in particular Stephen and Kate -- not necessarily the most likeable players in themselves -- while others are annihilated before they get this opportunity by the chemical weapons strike Stephen has called in on the village of Yaughton in the belief that the Pattern is a deadly alien plague.
Of these latter players, we see Wendy -- Stephen's mother -- who dies waving to the lethal jets that she mistakenly believes are a rescue, crying out to the son she was unable to find that "it's like your father coming home!" (a kind of innocence which, tied in with her backstory and her dead war hero husband, made me choke up something fierce). We see Frank, Wendy's brother -- estranged from her over his wife's death and his absence from it (it's implied that she partly blames him for Mary's assisted suicide at Father Jeremy's hands) -- who dies vowing to face the ultimate for Mary now when he didn't have the courage to do it in her hour of need. We see Lizzie, Stephen's long-lost love, now pregnant and determined to set out on a new life for her child with or without her lover (and without her boozer of a husband), who dies on the cusp of that journey marvelling at the jets overhead. We see others, too, especially the young girl Rachel singing a heartbreaking lullaby to an infant as the jets come in.
Father Jeremy's case is unclear... did he survive the jets only to be claimed by the Pattern? Or was he claimed by it beforehand (as seems more likely) believing all his parishioners to be gone? Hard to tell. But either way, he dies or passes -- a good man who served his community in the most human fashion -- in terror and anguished remonstrance with God.
The implication is that all of them have been gathered into the Pattern, with ghostly wisps or echoes of "the light they cast" left behind them. This implies a profoundly un-Gnostic idea: that the Pattern gathers all to it, effectively "raptures" them, regardless of who they are or what their sins. But it's hard to avoid a sense of tragic loss, of lives and stories and possibilities cut short. The lives of, in the cosmic sense, butterflies wiped out by something they didn't understand and never had a hope of understanding.
One of the songs on the luminous, hymnal soundtrack, "Slipping Away," says "we slip away and we are not afraid." But that doesn't in fact seem to be the case for many of the vanished. Another major refrain of the soundtrack, "How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord?" is redolent with irony, a calling-out to a divinity that nobody is actually ready to encounter when it comes. It's Psalm 13:
"(1)How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me? (2) How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me? (3) Consider and hear me, O Lord my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death..."
And of course what happens is the lightening of the players' eyes in the most literal sense. Did they want it? Is it really a good thing? Or is it an horrific tragedy as commonplace and quotidian as an ant encountering a boot?
I couldn't say. But I'm impressed by the exploration of warts-and-all humanity and ambiguous spirituality that goes on in this game.
The Pattern -- infinitely lonely, infinitely adaptable, not exactly long on tact or grasp of mortality but not malicious either -- is effectively a divine consciousness that doesn't grasp the constraints of the flesh. It's an illustration of the wonder, the terror, and the tragedy of being granted the opportunity to see God firsthand. And the story is a specific theological take on what that means.
Which is to say that what that means is complicated. Everyone in the game's story -- at least among the major players through whose viewpoints we see everything -- is led to confront specific inner demons and try to find some measure of peace. All of them are fully human and flawed characters, not always likeable but always comprehensible and always real and with their own specific roles to play.
Some of them get the benefit of what seems to be a final revelation of peace and hope, in particular Stephen and Kate -- not necessarily the most likeable players in themselves -- while others are annihilated before they get this opportunity by the chemical weapons strike Stephen has called in on the village of Yaughton in the belief that the Pattern is a deadly alien plague.
Of these latter players, we see Wendy -- Stephen's mother -- who dies waving to the lethal jets that she mistakenly believes are a rescue, crying out to the son she was unable to find that "it's like your father coming home!" (a kind of innocence which, tied in with her backstory and her dead war hero husband, made me choke up something fierce). We see Frank, Wendy's brother -- estranged from her over his wife's death and his absence from it (it's implied that she partly blames him for Mary's assisted suicide at Father Jeremy's hands) -- who dies vowing to face the ultimate for Mary now when he didn't have the courage to do it in her hour of need. We see Lizzie, Stephen's long-lost love, now pregnant and determined to set out on a new life for her child with or without her lover (and without her boozer of a husband), who dies on the cusp of that journey marvelling at the jets overhead. We see others, too, especially the young girl Rachel singing a heartbreaking lullaby to an infant as the jets come in.
Father Jeremy's case is unclear... did he survive the jets only to be claimed by the Pattern? Or was he claimed by it beforehand (as seems more likely) believing all his parishioners to be gone? Hard to tell. But either way, he dies or passes -- a good man who served his community in the most human fashion -- in terror and anguished remonstrance with God.
The implication is that all of them have been gathered into the Pattern, with ghostly wisps or echoes of "the light they cast" left behind them. This implies a profoundly un-Gnostic idea: that the Pattern gathers all to it, effectively "raptures" them, regardless of who they are or what their sins. But it's hard to avoid a sense of tragic loss, of lives and stories and possibilities cut short. The lives of, in the cosmic sense, butterflies wiped out by something they didn't understand and never had a hope of understanding.
One of the songs on the luminous, hymnal soundtrack, "Slipping Away," says "we slip away and we are not afraid." But that doesn't in fact seem to be the case for many of the vanished. Another major refrain of the soundtrack, "How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord?" is redolent with irony, a calling-out to a divinity that nobody is actually ready to encounter when it comes. It's Psalm 13:
"(1)How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me? (2) How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me? (3) Consider and hear me, O Lord my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death..."
And of course what happens is the lightening of the players' eyes in the most literal sense. Did they want it? Is it really a good thing? Or is it an horrific tragedy as commonplace and quotidian as an ant encountering a boot?
I couldn't say. But I'm impressed by the exploration of warts-and-all humanity and ambiguous spirituality that goes on in this game.
Other perspectives welcome. Have I missed anything?
