What it looks like when Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

In speaking with BeefJack, developer thechineseroom has shared new details and screenshots from the spiritual successor to its first-person adventure title Dear Esther.

Conceptually, creative director Dan Pinchbeck feels that Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture “is this almost ’60s-’70s Brit science fiction — this John Wyndham, John Christopher kind of thing — of how the end of the world would be responded to in a rural English location.”

The game is set in an open world centered around six separate characters in which you only get to play for an hour at a time. Naturally, the idea here is that you’ll learn more as you play and replay Rapture by exploring. Traveling diagonally from one corner of the map to the other would “probably take you around 20 minutes.”

Pinchbeck stated that the team is “looking at making it much more physically interactive [than Dear Esther], so you can manipulate objects, you can open and close doors.” I think that’s exactly what some of us were hoping to hear. While I’m probably more eager to see Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs come to fruition, this game will surely be worth watching ahead of its summer 2013 release.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture – Dear Esther’s successor [BeefJack]