You never see these people in the flesh, never learn what they look like, and yet I came away with a very real sense of who they are, even after just a handful of moments in the echoes of their presence. While we might never see everything that happens between the two, the script and the performances from the cast of voice actors are of such impeccably high quality, that it engages your imagination to fill in the gaps and create your own fiction.
When Jeremy bumps into Steve on the small stone bridge, Steve has clearly been a fight of some sort with Wendy, but seeing this before or after you see the two sharing a drink behind the pub puts these events in a completely different light. What’s quite fascinating is that, depending on how you move around the world you could see events unfold in a completely different order to someone else. You’re not being led to discover each and every nugget of story that is tucked away within the village, but are rather drawn into doing so of your own accord. Sometimes you will have to discover and trigger a scene to play out, but at other points, a more incidental conversation will unfold without your direct action. Quarantine notices on the front door of a house say that it’s been sealed because of an outbreak of flu, elsewhere, there’s an argument between two men, as one tries to reveal what’s really going on. On the one hand there are the quaint stories of village life which wouldn’t go amiss outside of a relaxing radio play, as Steve and Wendy reunite over a couple of drinks, years after their relationship fell apart, but keep exploring and you find that the end of the world as they knew it was already on their doorstep. You’re here to simply inhabit and be within Yaughton just as much as you are to uncover the lives of others and the events that transpired in the village’s last moments. That is, after all, the point of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. While the mysterious and magical light often tries to draw you through the world, whether by leaving a trail for you to follow, by appearing off in the distance or through the visual distortions in the world which herald its presence nearby, you’re free to explore the area as you see fit. It’s but a short scene, and as their conversation comes to a close the ball of light zooms off into the distance, drawing you a trail to follow into the heart of the village as the sun quickly climbs back into the sky and the shadows return to sprawl across the road. As the two women talk and gossip, their respective forms bloom along with their speech and giving these ultimately disembodied voices a form and presence within the world, it’s clear that this is a snapshot of a moment in time.
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