In a sense, of course, "You are here" is what video games have always been trying to tell us.
You move on, moving at a walking pace whose very slowness seems to enforce calm. By the shop, the door of a car hangs wildly open and a tin of paint has been tipped in crazy whorls across the tarmac. A strange, cavorting ball of golden light flickers distantly down the road. From a radio somewhere, a distant voice is reciting sequences of numbers in a voice without inflection. Move close to the posters in the bus shelter and you'll see an advertisement for the church raffle (tickets from Father Wheeler), a phone number for the local taxi firm, a concerned note about planning permission - and then, disconcertingly, a handwritten slip calling an emergency meeting on "Flu quarantine - what they are NOT telling us!". Things look innocuous enough at first: silver birches rustle gently in the wind, magpies and blackbirds sing unseen from the hedgerows, cow-parsley twines gently around the base of a telephone pole. The setting is the fictional Shropshire village of Yaughton, the time 1984, and as the player moves at walking pace down the broad street to the village green, an uncanny chill begins to descend. Be reassured.īut everything's far from all right in the snowglobe world of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a game that presents, in gloriously lush detail, the melancholy simulacrum of a British country settlement from which all human life has departed. It appears, next to a comforting red arrow, on a tourist map in the first building you enter, and anyone who's ever found themselves adrift in a strange place without a smartphone will recognise the miniature wash of relief that it brings. One of the first things you see, upon entering the strange deserted world of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, is a sign saying "You are here".
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