I bought Everybody's Gone to the Rapture because it was getting crazy good reviews/ratings, but it turned out to be very disappointing, not really worth the ($20 or so) price, and basically, a bad game.
It's essentially a story that plays out as you wander around the reasonably large (and rather convoluted) game world and interact with stuff. You can get more or less of the full story (there are multiple threads) but it's all more or less focused on the same event.
This sort of thing can be done well, and has been, but in this case there are two basic problems:
- The story itself really isn't very good. They're clearly trying to create an atmosphere of melancholy, mystery, and wonder, to keep you guessing at what "the thing that happened" really was, and to make you care about the characters whose words you hear. It does indeed start out as mysterious, but in the end, it seems sort of hackneyed, like they had a neat concept, but only spent about five minutes fleshing it out, and just filled in the rest randomly. Morever, the quality of the writing itself is pretty bad; the various subthreads covering character relations before and during "the event" are so crazily cliched that it's almost painful to listen to them, like reading a cheap weepy in the supermarket checkout line. The characters are neither interesting nor sympathetic, and very little of their dialogue rings true.
- The gameplay is awful—tedious, dull, and yet at the same time, quite frustrating. You wander around without any urgency, and to get all the story bits, you've got to be very thorough in your wandering, which is actually somewhat difficult because the game map is confusing and full of nooks and crannies. There's no real guidance for finding stuff, so basically you've got to methodically cover the entire map. Moreover, as has been noted many times elsewhere, the mere act of moving in this game is frustrating, as even with the (undocumented) "run" command, it's really slow. For a game whose only real action is moving, this seems almost bizarre.
Simply put, it isn't fun to play, and there's nothing to make up for that shortcoming. If it had a great story, or interesting characters, or interesting something, maybe the the lack of game play could be excused—but it has nothing.
The one positive point is that they've done a pretty good job of modelling a rural English village at a certain point in history (it's completely static mind you, but it's still pretty impressive). I imagine that must have taken a fair bit of effort, and it's sad they weren't able to do anything interesting with it...