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Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture Has A Hidden Run Button

By Daniel George

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When you’re growing up as a child, there’s a basic instinct in most to run about, explore the world that surrounds your very little body. It’s up to parents to remind you to “walk, don’t run,” not simply as a means of keeping their child safe, but to remind them to enjoy their surroundings while in the moment. The rest of the world will still be there, no matter how fast you go. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was seemingly designed purely to walk about, however the developers at The Chinese Room clarified in a blog post today that there are means of travelling the Shropshire-like village faster than at a brisk walk.

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According to the dev team, during the playtesting stage of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture there was an auto-sprint mode that activated if you continued moving in a direction, gradually picking up speed. However, those testing the game wanted to press a button to activate that themselves, giving them some sort of player agency in a game full of walking through other characters’ stories. So, very late in the final processes of development, they added it in by pressing and holding the R2 button. Unfortunately, they came into a problem they only realized late.

“The controller icon in the options menu was missing the sprint instruction, and it hadn’t been localised,” game designer Dan Pinchbeck relayed. “Localisation takes about 24 hours, but because the UI is build in Flash, it would have to be changed, and that would mean a full round of testing before creating a patch – about 4-5 days through the global QA pipeline, which we’re doing now, but wasn’t ready in time for release. It’s in the online manual, but not at the start of the game.”

Because of this, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture played a lot slower for everyone who reviewed it than those who are currently aware and will be aware of the full control schematics starting today. However, the style of game that The Chinese Room has created over the past few years (one that is light on gameplay and heavy on story) will inherently have critics split down the middle anyways. What is truly fascinating about this is that something as simple as a UI error could have a tacitly negative effect on the gameplay experience of those playing a game, especially in lengthy backtracking sessions.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture should serve as a lesson to those who plan on adding features late in the dev cycle, with a release date looming; wait to patch after release. There’s no benefit to rushing even the smallest detail, it seems.

h/t Game Informer

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