Has anyone here played "Everyone's gone to the rapture"

[Gingerbread Demon]

As the title says.

Has anyone here played it and what were your thoughts? Did you come away with more questions then answers because while it is a beautiful experience I felt like I had more questions then actual answers.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I haven't played either Everyone's Gone to the Rapture or Dear Esther, but it sounds like something that can really only be played once, as is the case with most walking simulators. Some move hidden objects around to add variety, but the underlying story remains the same. They are usually regarded as a sub-genre of art games. It's an interesting way to tell SF stories. Not everyone's imagination is good enough to fill in background details just by reading a literary work. Now, if AI could generate such interactive stories on the fly using a broad outline that you provide, that could be really interesting. Of course, the story might lack coherence in its elements, which might make it very dreamlike. I hate dreams enough as they are and I'm very glad I can't remember them.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I haven't played either Everyone's Gone to the Rapture or Dear Esther, but it sounds like something that can really only be played once, as is the case with most walking simulators. Some move hidden objects around to add variety, but the underlying story remains the same. They are usually regarded as a sub-genre of art games. It's an interesting way to tell SF stories. Not everyone's imagination is good enough to fill in background details just by reading a literary work. Now, if AI could generate such interactive stories on the fly using a broad outline that you provide, that could be really interesting. Of course, the story might lack coherence in its elements, which might make it very dreamlike. I hate dreams enough as they are and I'm very glad I can't remember them.

See I love your idea and years ago that is what I thought future movies or stories would be like where you were presented with a set of sliders for various things and you set your characters, their personalities and story outline, the locations and scenes for each part and the software would generate that movie or story, create all the characters and let you interact with it, for instance if it was a story you could walk through it and if you chose to create a movie you could watch what you created, and this kind of software would let people create the kind of stories they wanted to and would probably be harmful to the mainstream movie industry.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

According to Prof. Matthew Jockers at WSU, there are only six basic stories:

• Rags to riches – a steady rise from bad to good fortune
• Riches to rags – a fall from good to bad, a tragedy
• Icarus – a rise then a fall in fortune
• Oedipus – a fall, a rise then a fall again
• Cinderella – rise, fall, rise
• Man in a hole – fall, rise

Any other story element is merely embellishment. The plots may also be combined to create complexity.

Kurt Vonnegut was ahead of the curve:

“My prettiest contribution to the culture” was how the novelist Kurt Vonnegut described his old master’s thesis in anthropology, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun”. The thesis sank without a trace, but Vonnegut continued throughout his life to promote the big idea behind it, which was: “stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper”.

In a 1995 lecture, Vonnegut chalked out various story arcs on a blackboard, plotting how the protagonist’s fortunes change over the course of the narrative on an axis stretching from ‘good’ to ‘ill’. The arcs include ‘man in hole’, in which the main character gets into trouble then gets out again (“people love that story, they never get sick of it!”) and ‘boy gets girl’, in which the protagonist finds something wonderful, loses it, then gets it back again at the end. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers”, he remarked. “They are beautiful shapes.”

More information here:
Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots - BBC Culture

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[Asbo Zaprudder]

@Gingerbread Demon

Not having played Everyone's Gone to the Rapture, I don't know how I'd categorise it. Possibly, it's similar to Stalker (Roadside Picnic) or Solaris, and I don't know how I'd categorise those either. Sometimes, curves become asymptotic or disappear off into another dimension on something like a Riemann manifold. Two dimensional stories are perhaps too limited. Stories that extend beyond the ordinary, mundane and parochial interest me.

In 1828, Carl Friedrich Gauss proved his Theorema Egregium ("remarkable theorem" in Latin), establishing an important property of surfaces. Informally, the theorem says that the curvature of a surface can be determined entirely by measuring distances along paths on the surface. That is, curvature does not depend on how the surface might be embedded in 3-dimensional space. See Differential geometry of surfaces. Bernhard Riemann extended Gauss's theory to higher-dimensional spaces called manifolds in a way that also allows distances and angles to be measured and the notion of curvature to be defined, again in a way that is intrinsic to the manifold and not dependent upon its embedding in higher-dimensional spaces. Albert Einstein used the theory of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds (a generalization of Riemannian manifolds) to develop his general theory of relativity. In particular, his equations for gravitation are constraints on the curvature of spacetime.

Riemannian manifold - Wikipedia

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Well from my experience with this game I can say it did feel atmospheric and had a wonderful soundtrack but I only played it once fully all the way through. I did do a second run but that was broken into parts, and to examine the environment more.

Would I recommend it? Yes.
It's definitely worth playing at least once.
If you can find it cheap for it.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Well from my experience with this game I can say it did feel atmospheric and had a wonderful soundtrack but I only played it once fully all the way through. I did do a second run but that eas mite broken and to examine the environment more.

Would I recommend it? Yes.
It's definitely worth playing at least once.
If you can find it cheap for it.

I have it on my wish list so Steam will notify me if it ever goes on sale. However, I don't feel inclined to pay a lot for it if its replayability is basically zero. I think the first walking sim I played was Myst, and I've never felt inclined to revisit that series.

 

[Reverend]

I've never played 'Everyone's Gone to the Rapture', but I have played 'Gone Home' and 'What Remains of Edith Finch', which I gather are broadly similar to 'Rapture'.
On the whole, I'd say the assertion that they have zero replay value isn't quite accurate (at least not in these particular cases), but for most people it probably may as well be. Two is about the limit. The first one a pure, blind experience; the second hunting for context clues you may have missed the first time around. But yeah, once they're done, they're basically done.

Not that I regret getting either one as I appreciated them for what they were, and who knows; in a few years I may forget enough of the details that a replay seems appealing. So just to echo what others have said; the better examples of this genre are usually worth the time . . . if you can pick them up cheap (I actually got Edith Finch free from one of Epic's weekly giveaways, so can hardly complain.)

I tend to view these less as games per see, and more short-form stories that's presented with a game engine. So adjust one's expectations accordingly.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I liked the story of Gone Home and the fact the devs gave it away free in November 2016 which is when I snagged my copy of it.
I really got the impression at first that something bad had happened to the family and was thinking "horror story" in my first few minutes of playing because of the spooky feel of the house. But once I got the rest of the story I was still pleased with the game and enjoyed my time. They added a lot of floating icons to the game which you get in a commentary mode with voice overs from the creators.

That's definitely worth doing a second run for.

 

[Reverend]

I liked the story of Gone Home and the fact the devs gave it away free in November 2016 which is when I snagged my copy of it.
I really got the impression at first that something bad had happened to the family and was thinking "horror story" in my first few minutes of playing because of the spooky feel of the house. But once I got the rest of the story I was still pleased with the game and enjoyed my time. They added a lot of floating icons to the game which you get in a commentary mode with voice overs from the creators.

That's definitely worth doing a second run for.

Yeah one thing 'Gone Home' did really well was that fluid shift in tone. It's almost like a kind of "genre misdirection" at times. It's been a number of years since my playthrough, but from what I recall there was several stories threaded throughout that kind of wove together to give different perspectives on the members of this family and how they see each other. I also liked how a lot of it was implied rather than stated outright. It made you think and reflect and read between the lines.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Yeah one thing 'Gone Home' did really well was that fluid shift in tone. It's almost like a kind of "genre misdirection" at times. It's been a number of years since my playthrough, but from what I recall there was several stories threaded throughout that kind of wove together to give different perspectives on the members of this family and how they see each other. I also liked how a lot of it was implied rather than stated outright. It made you think and reflect and read between the lines.

OMG yes it did all that really well

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Just bought Everyone's Gone to the Rapture, Dear Esther and Exo One in the Xmas sale on Steam for a total of £16. I'll report back when I've had chance to play them. I might also revisit SpaceEngine at some point, which has no story at all other than one you create for yourself. I've been playing too much Civ5 recently and I also need to get back into Civ6. Civ7 is likely coming out next year. I'm hoping it'll be more like Civ5, to be honest - perhaps with a way to zoom into a procedurally generated map that makes it more realistic to the real world. I found Civ6 way too cartoony.

 

[Oddish]

I'm familiar with it... though it's not really my type of game, I appreciate the lush settings, the gorgeous soundtrack, the haunting ending, and the idea that they were trying to do something new, in terms of gaming.

Wow, that was a run-on sentence.