In a holiday blog post about their upcoming PlayStation 4 game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, The Chinese Room revealed that they’ve been hard at work on the game, and it’s approaching the alpha stage.
They explained what alpha means for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture:
This means the game world is now locked – after many revisions as we’ve worked getting things like pacing, signposting and transitions from area to area, and around the areas right. There’s a lot of backwards and forwards during this process, especially on a game that’s not delivering its story in a linear, corridor fashion. There are six major areas in the game, each of them needing a distinct identity whilst hanging together as a coherent whole, and getting that right needs in-depth iterations between design, audio and art.
After saying it’s been a big challenge to create a historically accurate and compelling fictionalized version of rural England in the 1980s, The Chinese Room revealed that voices were added to the game this past autumn, while the score will be recorded in March.
As of right now, The Chinese Room is “well past the half-way point,” and they admit talking about Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is difficult due to it being a mystery:
We can’t tell you anything about the story without potentially spoiling it, so you’re going to have to be patient on that front, but we’re really pleased with how a story as non-linear as this is all falling together in a way that is really powerful and engaging which, after all, was always the whole point.
There’s “a lot to do still” before the game will be ready, with most of it consisting of bug fixes, optimization, and balancing.
[Source: The Chinese Room]
