Feature

There’s a sprint button in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, but we’re not changing our score. Here’s why.

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Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, a first-person narrative game in the vein of Gone Home and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, released today on PS4 to divisive reviews. Critics, myself included, ranged greatly in their feelings on the game, from calling it “truly gripping” to a “walking simulator.”

One common point of contention in nearly every review was the movement speed. As I noted in my review, movement speed is so slow (and the world so large) that it actually discourages exploration, or at least makes you pause to wonder if checking a new area on the horizon is worth the trek.

Today, developer The Chinese Room dropped a bomb on reviewers: you can increase your speed by holding the R2 trigger for a few seconds.

Here’s what that looks like. It’s a subtle increase (I played for six hours and I’m not even sure when the guy in the video is sprinting or not), and it only builds after a few seconds of holding R2. Nowhere in the game, including the controller menu that shows the scant few button inputs, is this explained. It wasn’t mentioned in the review guide sent to reviewers. And I’m sure I speak for other critics when I say actively tried to find a way to increase speed, including pressing L3 and holding R2. Like many, with no obvious change in speed, I just didn’t hold it long enough.

This is a complicated situation for The Chinese Room, reviewers, and players alike. As studio head Dan Pinchbeck explains, the decision to put faster movement on R2 came extremely late in development–late enough that there wasn’t time to change the controls screen to actually reflect this. “We probably should have announced the run button before launch, but we didn’t,” said Pinchbeck. “That was a bad call, and we’ve paid for it in the reviews.” Indeed they did; when virtually every review holds the slow speed as a negative, one wonders whether the current 76 Metacritic score could have landed at 80, 85, or even higher. The experience critics had of playing the game could have been dramatically different knowing about this function from the start. Now that it’s too late to go back and play for the first time, have we done a disservice to our readers and jobs by reviewing the game without sprinting? Will the average player, who doesn’t read game sites, notice this for themselves?

Ultimately, I’ve decided not to update my score of the game (6.5 out of 10). I tend to rate games as an experience, and my experience–regardless of the sprint function’s existence–was negatively impacted by the poor communication of that ability. It wasn’t my biggest issue with the game, of course. Rapture might tell a good story, but it still removes a lot of player agency in doing so, ultimately turning Yaughton into more of a vignette museum than an environment ripe for interpretation. Its central conceit is that individuals and their stories are just as meaningful as cosmic events, but I didn’t feel that its cast earned that investment on my part.

And beyond that, rating games as an experience means, except for in dramatic cases, it isn’t fair or accurate to make post-review changes to a score. That updated score–say, a 7 instead of a 6.5–wouldn’t reflect my experience of playing. It would reflect the experience of playing *plus* a technical addendum unrelated to that experience. They’re on two totally different wavelengths. Combining an experiential scale with an additive one doesn’t make sense.

This morning, I summarized my thoughts about the issue in a series of tweets. Check those out below, and then sound off in the comments if you have thoughts to share on the matter. Feel free to ask anything about this review, my process, the game itself, etc.