Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

This is an excellent walking simulator with an interesting and disquieting atmosphere. However, there is no easy way of saving one's progress. I have played for five hours. It would have been four and a half hours had I not spent the remaining time desperately looking for a save point. I eventually gave up and lost 63 minutes of game play. I have now lost all interest in this game.
Having just done a web search, I discover that there is a save feature (involving the maps) which one has to opt into as a beta feature in "properties". This beta feature has, apparently, been available for some years now. Anyway, I have tried it and it has worked. Now, I can recommend this game, but would it not have been more sensible to incorporate this into the standard game download?

It is actually ridiculous how so interesting game can make me so sleepy at the same time. lolzZz
Jokes aside, I believe that this is a walking sim in purest form. Nothing is explained and everything is simplified. No running, no jumping, no shooting, no driving, no solving - just exploration that doesn't actually push you but slowly opens through you proceed and make your investigation.
The game can't come more blissful than this.

"Walking Sims" are poorly named. This category of games should rightly be called true "visual novels." The best ones, like this one, are like picking up a great piece of fiction literature, but you play it instead of reading it.

Pro's Best walking simulator bar none. Best video game music bar none. Best graphics in a video game bar none. Cons. Slow paced, hardly anything to do but walk and listen to people talking sometimes. I love this type of game as I can actually play it! Most games for my potato brain are to involved for me. So, If you are potato brained like me and even find Space Invaders too complicated, and don't mind endlessly walking and walking and walking, and doing very little else, then this is perfect game for you.

People throw shade at so-called walking simulators, but this is more than that. It's an emotional experience. It's haunting and beautiful. Very recommended.

This game is truly a treasure and I still feel some messages of it resonating in my soul. Walking through memories, through places where the everyday lives of the residents unfold before our eyes. Falling in and out of love, affairs, family disputes, who wants to date whom, who should stay away from whom. Here: we've entered the game. Meanwhile, there are sentences woven in with depths worth capturing in a photo and saving for rainy days when we can look out the window and ponder what life really means to us.
The story begins mysteriously. We don't know much about what happened. We get some guidance on understanding what is happening to the residents, but most of it can only be pieced together if we play through to the end.
The game is divided into chapters and each chapter shows the story of a different character, often ending with catharsis. Every character is different, and you just can’t wait to see who the next will be, whose soul you will see, whose story will touch your heart (or break it) next.
This is not a cheerful game, rather it’s incredibly moving and profoundly sad. If you find the beauty in that, it is your game. As the title suggests, everybody’s gone to the rapture and we piece together what happened from the memories and audio recordings left behind.
The basic gameplay is a walking simulator, so the gaming experience largely consists of walking around, following a beam of light, and listening to the events. We can interact with some elements, but these are mostly toys, doors, and playground elements. There are no puzzles to solve, our task is simply to experience the world around us and put together the story.
For me, the game's greatest advantages were:
- Jessica Curry's music, especially the parts with a chorus are incredibly touching and stay with the player long after. It is transcendental. I would play through it again and again just for the music.
- The dialogues feel real, making it easy to immerse oneself in the story
- The graphics are high-quality, and I often stopped to take a screenshot of the haunting, lonely landscape.
- The storytelling has a poetic way, very deep meanings, and a really good narration with the voice actors. They truly excelled.
Possible drawbacks:
- Even for a walking simulator, progress can be quite slow, although there is a fast walk option but it's not always usable. So, patience is needed. Also, if someone wants to complete all the achievements, one playthrough is not enough.
- For me, it was quite hard to start the memories with mouse in the beginning. This could have been made simpler. Essentially, you have to drag the light sphere horizontally back and forth until you find the point where it's the smallest.
- You are all alone, and the story can be quite dark, even the scenes darken sometimes, so it may give off some moderate horror vibes. But there is nothing in the gameplay that can hurt you.
All in all I wholeheartedly recommend it and I want to end the review with the most beautiful piece of quote I have ever seen in a game so far (spoiler!):
We are born apart, driftwood on the banks of an endless dark ocean, and we will be carried away by the swell soon enough. But in between, in the single day of living, that dancing in a strip of sunlight, we can find what we miss, the love that makes us whole, the immanence.

So I am a big fan of the walking sim genre, and I can honestly say this game was a beautiful masterpiece to come across. The soundtrack alone, is so poignant that combined with the characters stories you cannot help but fall heart first into this beautifully 'raptured' world. Without giving away spoilers this game made me cry, angered, shocked and wounded, on so many levels. At first it seemed like a bit like every other walking sim, a sad narrative, puzzles and information fed on a slow drip, while walking through a baron world that's exquisite in details. But from the very start it was jarring, and even reminisced, in a odd way; times when Covid first hit us. The characters became more and more cherished to me the further I went on into the game, having formed emotional ties to several of them before I even reached the end of the game. For a game that does not show you what characters look like, only passive information about them, I think was a sublime move, because by the end of the story I had already formed mental images of how each character looked (and behaved via light) it is rare that a walking sim engages me on that level. The ending ripped my at my heartstrings, all accumulating to finding out who you are to the world & story. Emotionally it was enough to pull at anyone's heart strings, if you are heavily into stories and walking sims. I cannot recommend this game enough to fans of narrative driven games.