Then we are back to the issues of scale, as the story, which guides you through the waning lives of several characters, loops back to its key ones and back to the science-fiction mystery we’ve given up on for hours in favor of English infidelity. There is a difference between the thematic, profound emptiness of the absence of others and the dull emptiness of a beautiful world that doesn’t feel lived-in, though aesthetically consistent.
Snooping through the detritus of peoples’ homes should say more. The beautiful village is unremarkable to the outsider, and the flitting luminescence of peoples’ lives hardly feels grounded in the environment that was meant to have connected them. I, apparently, struggle telling a dozen English voices apart and remembering their names, devoid of context or faces.īut why the long walking between points of interest? Rapture is beautiful, no doubt, but that fidelity and scale means that differing local pubs carry the same hand-written signage and no one seems to have personal affects in their vehicles. And it is stuffed with characters, but you only hear them in snippets, like a radio play, after stumbling on orbs of light (and awkwardly tilting the PS4 controller) or abandoned radios. The “pattern,” the frightened townspeople fed lies about “influenza,” the bloodied tissues strewn about, the quarantine. Rapture, on the other hand, is scaled towards a mysterious apocalypse that has seemingly wiped out all things, including this entire village. The exploratory nature of Gone Home, confined to a single family house and connected with tactile engagement, develops its personal story through telling detail. And still there are blocks, stores, buildings, entire neighborhoods that I have hardly any connection to, that walking through wouldn’t evoke any intimate feeling. It isn’t small town England, but I’ve literally walked it from end to end it’s not huge. That technical snafu highlights Raptures biggest problem: it is slow and empty.
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