New video game exposes players to the revealing light of the Rapture

We live in a culture that is obsessed with the idea of apocalypse. That could be helpful for evangelism because it seems to highlight questions for which Christians have answers. But our cultural obsession is more about apocalyptic events than the apocalypse itself.

Popular stores like The Walking Dead, The Road, and Interstellar, address how humanity might respond and the moral tensions that might arise if the world as we know it suffered a radical and irreparable change. What pop culture almost never grapples with is the concept of the end itself, the apocalypse in the traditional sense.

Video game producer The Chinese Room sets out to change that with its new offering, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, a game in which players explore a world where humanity has met its end.

As the title suggests, the game’s premise plays on the American Christian eschatological concept of the Rapture. The game’s opening sequence is reminiscent of Left Behind: players find cars in the middle of roads with their doors hanging open and empty pubs with cigarettes still burning in ashtrays. The inhabitants of Yaughton, a fictional English village, seem to have very recently vanished into thin air, leaving players to search for answers.

Despite how dramatic this might sound, this game is nowhere near as gruesome as most post-apocalyptic games, nor as bombastic as the most recent Left Behind film—blood-soaked tissue and animal carcass that evince the build up to the game’s cataclysmic event are the game’s only graphic images. Players never observe the drama of the apocalyptic event, only its buildup and aftermath.

Most of the game is spent chasing down moving orbs of light that are somehow complicit in the world’s demise. Periodically, the orbs take the shape of the deceased villagers and act out their final moments. While these memories uncover, to some extent, the mysterious nature of Yaughton’s demise, that is not their primary function. The memories expose the villagers for who they really are—their deepest fears and most troubling infidelities, weaknesses, and failures are exposed in the light of the end.

Rapture (available on Playstation 4) asks players to consider what would be brought to light if the true nature of their lives were exposed. Seeing the end approaching forces Yaughton’s inhabitants to deal honestly with themselves and their part in their broken lives and relationships and, in a sense, to repent. In that sense, Rapture is an apocalyptic game in the truest sense. While far from an explicitly evangelistic game, Rapture portrays exposure as an invitation to life, freedom, and change.