Shropshire Star

Watch: Shropshire's digital makeover for Everybody's Gone To The Rapture games release

[gallery] It's Shropshire . . . but not as we know it. The county and some of its better known tourist attractions and landmarks are to be the backdrop for the eagerly awaited new PS4 summer release Everybody's Gone To The Rapture.

Published

It sets the player the challenge of being the sole survivor of a post apocalyptic world and piecing together clues to find out what happened to the people who perished.

The ambitious game is being put together by award-winning developers, Brighton-based The Chinese Room – and it is tipped to be one of the global gaming hits of the year.

Creative director Dan Pinchbeck said Shropshire was chosen because it was quintessentially English and the perfect foil for a distinctly sinister game scenario.

He said: "At the beginning of the game you find yourself on the outskirts of the village, which is an idyllic, beautiful village nestled in the Shropshire countryside.

"Everything seems perfect, everything seems wonderful – but there are no people to be found anywhere.

"As you gradually go further into the valley and explore you begin to realise something quite terrible has happened.

"You are free to explore, you can go wherever you want, you can go into people's houses, you can answer the telephone, turn on radios, televisions and computers.

"What we've talked about a lot is the thing we really want more than anything else is we want you to care. We want you to care about the characters and what happened to them and that's the real key part of the game, just this sense of wanting to explore deeper and deeper and deeper into this game and discover what happened."

So why was Shropshire selected as the backdrop?

"We spent a long time thinking," Dan said.

"We really wanted to capture that spirit and essence of Englishness, so we did a lot of looking round at different parts of the country.

"Trying to find somewhere that captured that kind of very hard to try and pin down sort of Englishness but also had quite a diverse landscape, diverse communities within it.

"After a long drawn out process of research it came down to the fact you go with your heart and 'this is right, it's going to have to be Shropshire'."

The director said there would be plenty for people living in the county to recognise as they played the game.

The game is set in the county in 1984.

"One of the things it was important we looked at was things like accurate phone codes," he said.

"The phone codes in the game will provide a real clue as to which parts of Shropshire we are zeroing in at.

"That was really important. In the train stations you can see the stations that are on the line the train station goes to from the valley are real places in Shropshire.

"So even though the valley is fictional you can zero in on a map and find out roughly where it is, if people pick up exactly where in Shropshire we are positioning this village in."

Pictures released by the developers ahead of its release suggest there will be landmarks based on Bridgnorth's Severn Valley Railway, Lake Vyrnwy in Mid Wales and the county's highest point, Brown Clee.

The game will be based around six characters, each telling their own story of the apocalypse, and each connected to various landmarks in the world that develop as the game progresses.

"It uses simple gameplay – basic exploration of a first-person world – so it's very friendly to people without a lot of game experience," Dan said.

"But it's not casual in the classic sense – this is a deep and immersive game.

"It's all about the end of the world. You play the role of a scientist, trapped in the very second of the apocalypse, and the game is about discovering what has happened.

"You do this by exploring a large open-world environment, and interacting with the objects, places and people you find to gradually unlock and put together the story.

"There's also a really cool thing you can do which makes the game really different and makes this process of exploring the story something you could only do in a game, but we're keeping that secret for now.

"Expect a reveal about that in due course, but we're very excited about it and can't wait to show it off.

"We can promise you that Everybody's Gone to the Rapture will be powerful and deep, highly immersive and with an absolute focus on your emotional journey through the world.

"It's non-linear, with a dynamic and adaptive environment, so this is about your story, a really individual experience that breaks away from the on-rails nature of lots of story-driven games into something that you have a visible impact on," added Dan.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture will be available exclusively on the PlayStation 4 system.

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