Everybody’s Been Left Behind by the Rapture

(NOTE: This post contains story spoilers for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.)


In the final minutes of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, a character comments on “the necessity of presence born from absence.” And presence born from absence is a very real thing to me.

I don’t so much believe as feel that we leave traces of ourselves behind, that echoes of us linger in some way in the places that we’ve been. Out of necessity, this notion is at the heart of games like Gone Home, Sunset, and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, in which you explore environments and discover something about the lives of the people who have inhabited them. If traces of us didn’t linger in the places we’d been, there would be nothing to discover in these games. But Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture takes a different, less realistic approach to this process of exploration and discovery than those other games do. Rather than just exploring an uninhabited place and finding clues to the lives of the people who have been there, you see ghostly, glowing echoes of human figures. There is movement. There are voices. Events that occurred in this English village in the middle of 1984 play out before you, the past alive in the present.

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This storytelling approach appeals to me because I feel the past in the present. There are places here in San Francisco that tug on my heart a bit each time I walk past them, places I’ve been with people I care about where I can recall moments that happened so vividly that I almost feel like if I enter these places, I’ll find myself and those other people still living out those moments. I can remember the way someone smiled, or the way someone’s fingers looked holding a glass, or the songs that were playing in the background.

If you could go into these places and hear us talking, you wouldn’t hear conversations about the end of the world. You’d hear us talking about hobbies and passions, movies we saw when we were teenagers, books or sex or feminism or friends, tacos or Thai food, relationship problems, video games, struggles at work, anxieties about the future. Not “Is a meteor going to strike the earth?” anxieties but “How am I going to pay the rent?” anxieties, “How am I going to find love?” anxieties.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture wants its storytelling to feel intimate, but it doesn’t sufficiently give us a chance to get to know who its characters are in moments of ordinary human honesty and intimacy. There are a few such moments, like a tender conversation in a pub between the now-married Steven and his old flame Lizzie, but much more often than not, the game’s characters act as cogs in the machinery of its plot rather than as real people who have been living real lives. Conversations about nosebleeds and headaches and false flu epidemics and dead birds and disappearing people and calling in airstrikes are all meant to make us interested in just what the hell happened here, but without doing the work of making us care about the people it’s happening to. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture doesn’t seem to understand that the little things are the big things. They are the high-stakes drama. They are the things that matter.

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Actually, Rapture undermines itself in a number of ways. It gives you a gorgeous open world to explore but wants to tell you a story that makes the most sense if you obediently follow orbs of light around from place to place. It tries to create a sense of urgency to your investigation, but your movement speed, even when holding down the “sprint” button, feels more appropriate for a lazy stroll about town. Its greatest failing, though, is that it’s a human drama that skimps on the humanity.

There are games that know how to tell stories about richly human characters in extraordinary situations. Kentucky Route Zero’s narrative about a surreal road trip defies straightforward logic or literal understanding, but it remains grounded in the humanity of its characters, even the ones who aren’t, strictly speaking, human. It does this by acknowledging the complexities of human memory, emotion, and desire, giving us scenes devoted to people revealing themselves to each other, or, just as often, not revealing themselves to each other, and in those cases, the ways in which the characters don’t reveal themselves to each other are themselves revealing. Because the game captures this humanity so beautifully, a luminous dignity shines through in all of its characters as they struggle with loss, debt, aging, and dehumanizing systems of labor and bureaucracy.

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The Last of Us: Left Behind is among the very best examples of human storytelling in video games, and crucial to its success is the way that it focuses not on the dangers of the post-pandemic world that Ellie and Riley live in, but on the ordinary moments its two main characters manage to carve out for themselves in that harsh world. If those two had spent most of their time talking about the infected and the crises facing the remnants of humanity, I might have cared about their plight in an abstract sense, but I wouldn’t have felt like I’d gotten to know them as people. However, Left Behind’s storytelling doesn’t focus on heightened dialogue about the global catastrophe. It focuses on Ellie and Riley playing games with each other. Putting on Halloween masks. Riding a carousel. Taking pictures in a photo booth. All these moments that just let them be people. And crucially, Left Behind understands that real people don’t always say what they mean. These are characters who dance around the truth and hide what they really want from each other. “You should go,” Ellie says at one point, when all she really wants to say is “Don’t go.” She’s too scared to come out and say it. She doesn’t want to push Riley away. She’s afraid of rejection and misunderstanding. Like a real person.

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Because of this complexity and the way the game takes its time with moments devoted purely to developing the relationship between its characters, my investment in Ellie and Riley was so great, and their connection to each other was so believable, that if you just put me in that mall from Left Behind and let me walk around, Rapture-like, I would still see them dancing, I would still hear them laughing, just like I can still see and hear echoes of myself and the people I care about lingering in all those places around San Francisco.

In Rapture, the underdeveloped humanity is just a functional tool to serve the hollow sci-fi plot, a plot that ultimately means little because there is so little humanity in it. In this sense, it’s appropriate that the characters appear as half-formed beings of light; they never take on much definition in our minds, either. Their one-note character traits (town busybody, concerned priest) never get the spark of messy, conflicted, contradictory life they’d need to become anything more than stock parts that one can use in the creation of compelling characters, but that do not in and of themselves compelling characters make. If Rapture’s sci-fi plot had been in the service of elevating its humanity rather than the other way around, then this game might have actually had the glowing, singing spiritual core it so desperately pretends to have.

In the end, the character responsible for the crisis that has befallen this small Shropshire town reflects on her actions. She has been viewed as an outsider by many of the town’s residents because of her nationality; because some feel she usurped the love that rightly belonged to Lizzie; because, it’s implied at one point, of her race. She says to herself in the game’s final moments, “We understand now our failure to touch, to belong.” And here at last is a human heart to this story. It seems to say that all of this has really been about this woman’s loneliness and isolation. I understand this. This makes sense to me. I know what it is to feel like an outsider, to feel like the people around me aren’t really seeing me, and I have sometimes asked myself how much I am really alienated by others and how much I isolate myself as a preemptive defense against that alienation. These are good, human questions, worthy of good, human stories. If the game had spent more time exploring this character’s plight and the complexities of her connections with others, it might have felt like it was saying something real and true, and not just tacking an explanatory motivation on to justify all the grandiose sci-fi happenings that had come before. But unfortunately for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, this was too little humanity, too late.