Your character walks at an achingly slow pace - honestly, the movement speed is slower than nearly any first-person game in recent memory. Well, maybe “rush” isn’t quite the right word, because movement speed is Rapture’s most prominent problem. If you want, you could rush straight towards the finale and reach the conclusion without piecing together its story. In a tight experience where everything else felt necessary, these tilt moments felt a bit shoehorned in.Įxploration is the real gameplay, and so it’s valuable that this world is open right from the start. Rapture doesn’t do a great job of cluing you in on what to do in these situations, and it took me a few hours to actually wrap my head around this form of interaction. The world is littered with floating balls of light that unfold into short vignettes that show you a brief moment from before the apocalyptic event occurred in order to activate the more important ones, you have to tilt the DualShock 4 and find the right frequency of the light, as if you’re tuning a radio. While Rapture never holds your hand, it also takes steps to make sure you’re never too lost in its world.Īctual game mechanics are about at sparse as they come - aside from moving around the world playing “collect the scattered objects,” the only means of interaction in Rapture are a single button that opens doors and turns on radios, and some slightly obtuse tilt functionality. Likewise, there’s some really smart sound design at play that subtly guides you toward points of interest.For instance, when you approach a radio or telephone (which act as audio diaries), you’ll begin to hear soft humming and static. Haunting ambient noises that almost come across as the voices of those who vanished in the event pepper the world, reminding you that this place wasn’t always so empty. Piecing together how each major player deals with the events of Rapture provides a complex and rewarding portrait.Īll of this is heightened by a fantastic score that punctuates the bigger moments with booming, hymnal music, which in a world completely devoid of human life, ends up taking on a life of its own. Discovering the arc of how a God-fearing priest comes to terms with his creator in the face of such unexplainable events, or how a lone American, thousands of miles away from home, dealt with being an outsider in this quaint village led to some really powerful, memorable character moments. Throughout the five hours I was introduced to six major characters, each of whom have really interesting backstories that felt great to slowly gain an understanding of. I really appreciated the way it trusted me to find bits and pieces of a person’s life out of order, and figure out how they all fit together without holding my hand. Rapture’s cast enters and exits the story in the same way characters do in a skillfully directed ensemble movie. It felt just as great when a turn of events proved me wrong as it did when one proved me right. I really loved how my theories regarding the mystery kept evolving throughout my playthrough - I continually oscillated between hypothesizing that the events were rooted in religious, alien, or human-caused reasons. I felt compelled to explore every nook and cranny, as doing so almost always added another piece to Rapture’s impressive, mysterious puzzle. Tiny details litter the environment that help add depth to the characters, world, and story: a pair of crutches lay abandoned outside a church, a picnic sits half-eaten on a hillside, and tennis rackets lay strewn about a court as if abandoned mid-game. Well-written audio diaries, fantastic character interactions, and environmental storytelling clues all come together to build a great, mysterious tale. From the beginning, Rapture utilizes a slew of effective storytelling techniques to get across its intriguing and affecting tale of a quiet English village whose inhabitants suddenly begin to disappear into swirls of light.
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