The only time I have ever seen a flying milk bottle was on the night of the 15th October 1987, when one passed impossibly by the window of my parents’ bedroom in Kent. The next morning, after the Great Storm had dissipated, everyone came out of their houses to survey the damage - fences, sheds, telephone poles and roofs, the checklist of a very British disaster. We went to the park and climbed the same trees we always climbed, now lying on their sides.

I hadn’t thought about the storm for years until Dan Pinchbeck brought it up while we were discussing Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, a game about the end of the world and England in the 1980s which he made with Jessica Curry and their studio, The Chinese Room. It’s one of this year’s best - a walk through a glorious Shropshire village empty apart from the echoes of everyday life leading to an abrupt end, a drama about people and place. Pinchbeck, he tells me, grew up a small village a lot like this one, a Cold War childhood filled with various previews of the apocalypse - the storm, the miners’ strikes, the AIDs epidemic and, in 1984 - the year Rapture is set - that bleak visualisation of local nuclear holocaust, Threads.

I have been a latecomer to the work of The Chinese Room, although the studio also seems a latecomer to itself. For years it existed inside the University of Portsmouth’s school of creative technologies, where Pinchbeck’s research took the form of sophisticated mods riffing on the normally violent first-person games he liked to play. Curry was never part of the university but always part of the creative team - “My writing and her music dovetailed really well” Pinchbeck says - which eventually produced Dear Esther, a game initially built using the Half-life 2 engine, about a grieving man exploring a Hebridean island. Dear Esther put The Chinese Room on the map - first when the original mod reached over 100,000 downloads, and then when environment artist Rob Briscoe emailed “out of the blue” to suggest a high-quality rebuild which, after a gruelling few years of work and fundraising, led to a commercial release. Having hoped to sell 20,000 copies Pinchbeck remembers launch, “Jess and I sat in bed watching at midnight watching Steam, the counter going up. F---! S---!” The game sold 50,000 in the first week.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a walk through a glorious Shropshire village empty apart from the echoes of everyday life leading to an abrupt end.

Being a latecomer I played Dear Esther directly after Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture. This doubling up ensured that the The Chinese Room’s work - exploring empty places, uncovering meaning through music, space and motion - coloured my 2015 in the way a handful of works, thoughts and moments seem to every year. Dear Esther is about landscape and loss, our broken narrator walking island paths and reading letters to the always-absent Esther, referencing a book about the island written 300 years before. It struck me as like an imagined extra chapter to another work that defined my year, Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks, in which the author reads other nature writers while visiting either the writers themselves or, most evocatively, the places they wrote about - being on the same spot thinking the same thoughts, as our anonymous explorer does in Dear Esther, collapses time, pulls us away from the limiting human scope of our regular thinking and, in the game, desperately attempts to erase trauma.

Not just place but specificity is crucial to The Chinese Room’s games. The most astonishing moment of Dear Esther isn’t the discovery of a wrecked ship, or the revelation of luminous, glittering caves on the inside of the grey wet hills, but a disembodied flashback on a ghostly M5, a drowning nightmare of the crash at the centre of the game’s sense of loss. Away from the abstractions of hills and horizons, it’s the familiarity of the scene - the folder crash carrier, the blue junction sign hailing Weston-Super-Mare - that punches through to something ordinary and painful.

The game takes place in the village of Yaughton at the end of the world.

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture is full of these details, these signifiers of a vulnerable normality. On my drive to Brighton to visit the studio I had a nagging sense of recognition that for a moment I couldn’t place. The dual carriageway into town is flanked by triangular signs warning of pedestrians in the road ahead, a pictogram of an adult holding a small child by the hand. It’s easy not to see these familiar details, but the sign is a legacy of the great design project led by Margaret Calvert in the 1960s to unify Britain’s roadsigns, to encode a national language of place (the project also responsible for the font and format of Dear Esther’s sign). A moment later I realised this image is the basis of the game’s title artwork, of two silhouetted figures holding hands on a hill, of sad calm at the end of everything, of institutionalised Britishness.

Pinchbeck says that Rapture looks “deceptively simple” - an empty space, slowly explored - but that under the surface it’s complex and fragile, “a spiderweb made of glass.” He describes the project as over-scoped and under-budgeted - the studio, too, thought it would be simpler at the beginning, and one early concept had the game lasting for 60 minutes, at which point the world would end, player emotion hinging on this immoveable deadline. Pinchbeck describes this as a “classic academic thing where it sounds good, but in practice you’d just be getting involved and it would end. Rubbish.”

The team’s core ideas remained, though. Curry was interested in the power of domestic situations following the studio’s work on horror sequel Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, and Pinchbeck was keen on doing something “Wyndham-y”. Initially the setting was contemporary, but gradually slipped backwards until, Pinchbeck remembers, it seemed to settle in the 1980s. This game about looking back wouldn’t be set in the period of the genre it draws on - the cosy catastrophes of 1960s British science fiction - but instead in 1984, in the childhood of its creators.

This is nostalgia in the original sense, the pain of not being able to return home. And here’s that specificity again, of place and of time. Pinchbeck says Rapture settled into the 1980s as this peculiar middle-ground of parochialism and globalisation, when life was both insular (Pinchbeck’s own village was cut off after the great storm, the one house with hot water selling baths for a fiver) but with a growing sense of the potential for planetary disaster - strikes and plagues and Threads.

Which is why Rapture is, ultimately, a game about people. The sort of villages and communities it’s about were places where individual dramas are as weighty as international incidents. While the structure of the game evolved, Pinchbeck says the major characters were all written very early on in development. “We didn’t know what the apocalypse was yet, but we knew who it would happen to.” And the structure of the game, in which the narrative is gathered by the player piece by piece, glittering echoes written in light activated by our presence, gives a uniquely human element to its characters. It is, like this year’s police interview mystery Her Story, a discoverable drama, accumulated by the player in a flexible order. It’s entirely possible to miss scenes, to skip moments and explanations that can shift our perception of these people completely - a clue to the hesitant station master Howard’s PTSD, say, or the moment when village busybody Wendy finds him having a flashback and insists, sensibly, on putting him straight, her urge to interfere redrawn as forceful neighbourliness.

I ask if Pinchbeck gets anxious about players missing scenes - moments he carefully wrote, that Curry carefully scored, that their team crafted together. But he likes the possibility of missing not just scenes, but whole and unseen sides to people. It’s what really happens, he says. “We make judgements and assumptions about people based on moments of meeting them”. Rapture is a game about these moments that make people, that make life - moments that include the petty and misunderstood as much as the happy, cherished or triumphant. In showing us all these things happening to the ethereal traces of the already-eradicated, the game insists on these moments all being equal in the sum of our lives.

So my final question about this game which helped to define my year, this examination of people and place - is it possible, I ask Pinchbeck, that he’s made a game set somewhere very small, that’s actually about the meaning of life?

“Haha! Yes.”