The non-linear storytelling of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

Chinese Room: "Our job's not to force players to engage with this, it's to inspire players to want to engage with this."

At the recent Sony Digital Showcase, we got the chance to sit down and play a slice of Everybody's Gone to Rapture, the eye-catching story-driven adventure coming to PS4 this year, and afterwards we chatted to Chinese Room's Creative Director Dan Pinchbeck about the game's story.

"The big thing for us was to tell a story that only a game could tell - create a world, pack it full of story then let the player go, wander, explore and discover for themselves," he explained.

The game drops you in a tranquil, idyllic - and seemingly empty - english village. You're left to walk around and try and discover what's happened here.

"There's six areas in this english countryside, in the valley the game takes place in," Pinchbeck outlines. "In each area there are these glowing balls which represent these strange phenomenon. There are a number of those, and finding all of those unlocks a mini-climax in that area. And each area relates to one of the central characters in the story."

But as the player's free to go where they wish, they not only could only witness a small portion of the story before finishing the game ("it's actually possible to clear the game and maybe do a third of the game") they can stumble on different plot lines at any time, and none may be in order.

"There's multiple plot-lines running and developing simultaneously, but they don't run in linear order. So you may experience something at the beginning of the game, but the setup to that scene might be coming an hour or two hours later."

It was a big challenge for the writing team, the director explains, with the team not even sequencing the stories properly until it came to recording audio ("It was only when we went into the studio to record the voice actors was the first time we really put the script in linear order and had them record it linear order")

"Because it's non-linear, the player's not being openly directed to any particular part of the story, [so] the order in which they discover facts about what's gone on could change radically from player to player, which means everyone could end up with very different interpretations of the events that happened. That's scary, but really exciting."

The game's due out before the end of the summer on PS4, and we'll have hands-on impressions on the site in the near future.