Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture - Out now on PS4 - PC version confirmed

Hi there, we’re Dan and Jessica, Co-Directors of The Chinese Room. We’re based in Brighton, on the south coast of the UK. We made a game called Dear Esther for PC last year that was a first-person story-driven exploration and mystery title. It was all about immersion and emotion, rather than having lots of complex gameplay, and was slow and poetic, with a really strong emphasis on the quality of the production – music, art, writing, voice-over.

It was one of the breakout indie hits of 2012, gathering up a whole bag of international awards and shifting over three quarters of a million copies. We were left thinking “how do you follow that?”

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, our new game, is our attempt to answer that question, and I want to tell you a little about it.

Like Dear Esther, the new game is all about the story. It uses simple gameplay – basic exploration of a first-person world – so it’s very friendly to people without a lot of game experience. But it’s not casual in the classic sense – this is a deep and immersive game.

It’s all about the end of the world. You play the role of a scientist, trapped in the very second of the apocalypse, and the game is about discovering what has happened. You do this by exploring a large open-world environment, and interacting with the objects, places and people you find to gradually unlock and put together the story.

There’s also a really cool thing you can do which makes the game really different and makes this process of exploring the story something you could only do in a game, but we’re keeping that secret for now. Expect a reveal about that in due course, but we’re very excited about it and can’t wait to show it off.

When we started making Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, we knew we wanted to make a console title. We also knew that Sony were committed to pushing really interesting indie and experimental work, and figured they’d be into the ideas we were putting together. In a completely idealistic and high risk move, we forgot about the idea of a Plan B, put together a prototype and approached Sony Santa Monica. They were just shipping Journey and Unfinished Swan and we thought we’d have a lot in common in terms of ideas about story, gameplay, player experience.

So what can you expect? Well, we can promise you that Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture will be powerful and deep, highly immersive and with an absolute focus on your emotional journey through the world. It’s non-linear, with a dynamic and adaptive environment, so this is about your story, a really individual experience that breaks away from the on-rails nature of lots of story-driven games into something that you have a visible impact on.

We’ve got a brilliant team of developers here, most of whom have come straight from AAA production and have worked on some of the best games to come out of the UK in recent years. As studio heads, it’s inspiring to look at the talent and experience on the team and more than anything, it makes us confident we’re making a really great game for you.

We’ll be introducing them over on the studio blog at http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/blog over the next few weeks as we really kick into full production, and sharing more information about the game with you here as things develop. For now, we just want to say “hello” and let you know how unbelievably excited we are to be here, making this thing for you. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

1cmanny1 wrote:What ever happened to Amnesia?

Denster » Fri Jun 13, 2014 11:56 pm wrote:I thought this was related to Bioshock.

February 11, 2015

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are at alpha

Dan Pinchbeck

Well, we made it. Last week we submitted the alpha build for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture to Sony Santa Monica for build approval and they gave us the big thumbs up. This means we’re hurtling straight towards Beta and then Gold.


In real terms? OK, so it doesn’t get any easier – the back half of development is all go, ramping up detail in all angles, intergrating stuff like crazy, polishing the hell out of anything we can… and the bugs. It’s all about the bugs. So by this point the world is locked, scenes are locked, we know what is happening where and when and why and how, but there’s a big difference between that “it works” and “it’s a great game”, which is where we all want it to be.


QA kicks in hard now, with both Sony’s internal teams and our new in-house QA tech – Foucauld Escaillet, who we’re incredibly happy to welcome onto the team – will be playing the game over and over and over looking for everything from texture seams to places where things could, well, just be tightened up a notch (and there’s always plenty of those). The art team split their time between bug fixing and environmental storytelling; now the world is there in its major components, it’s time to focus on the small details that really sell the sense of place and people.


In a month’s time, Jess hits the studio with orchestra and choir to record what I’m sure will be recognised as her best work to date – a score of incredible power and subtlety – and then together with sound designer Adam she’ll begin the long process of mixing and integration. At this point, all of the audio in the game, including voice-overs and procedurals, gets overhauled, tuned to each other and gently massaged into the immersive soundscape we’re aiming for.


We’ve just wrapped the first instance of a brand new AI system, which I can’t talk about without giving too much away, but together with the effort now going into ambient visual effects is bringing the world to life around us. The stunning voice-overs recorded last year are being fleshed out with visuals and foley, and we’re heading back to the studio in a couple of months to add the last parts of the game in, and there’s some incredibly exciting news headed your way about that in the near future.


Nope, we’re not going to GDC. Nope, we’re not doing any interviews at the moment. Nope, there’s no new trailer or screenshots coming your way for a little while yet. It’s heads down time, the unglamorous bit of development where you just grind away, making it as good as you can - the bit where you understand game development is about craft as much as it’s about art. We’ll surface again sometime around March with more news, but for the moment, we just wanted to let you know where we are, and that we’re making something we’re really proud of. This is going to be our best game yet.

http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/blog