The indie developer behind Dear Esther, The Chinese Room, has now released a new atmospheric adventure game/"walking simulator" called Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Despite its sci-fi elements and many intentionally cryptic audio logs to go through, EGR is fundamentally a much less abstract and conceptual story than Dear Esther and I'm not sure what I think about that.

The previous game's artful fusion of physical and emotional landscapes was achieved through a dense, highly literate script which could often come off as pretentious and vague for the sake of being vague. Interestingly enough, EGR takes the exact opposite approach by building atmosphere and mood through the uncanny disconnect between the game's idyllic environments and its outlandish story events. Esther's morose narrator seemingly explored the sad but fascinating history of a windswept Hebridean island while only occasionally hinting at the actual storyline of the game. By contrast, EGR grounds its central mystery in a much clearer structure and with more straightforward (even melodramatic) characterizations.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture provides a more gripping and thrilling narrative experience, but the price it pays for its relative concreteness and immediacy is that it risks slipping into sheer sentimentality and kitsch. Powered by CryEngine, the impressively rendered English countryside is one of the game's biggest assets but also proves to be its greatest vulnerability, since the sedate conformity of a provincial place like Yaughton lends itself more naturally to mundane soap operas than it does to grand sci-fi adventures with heavy existential themes.