The world has come to an end… again.

This time it hasn’t burned to the ground, become irradiated wasteland, or overrun by mutant tribes. It’s come to the quaint country village of Yaughton, Shropshire. I spent some time exploring it, and didn’t once come across any guns, skulls, tripwires, or improvised explosives. There was, however, a pot of tea, a stack of boardgames, and a toilet roll. This is a very English apocalypse.

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(If you missed our IGN First drop on Monday, you'll want to check out the video above. It showcases 13 new minutes of gameplay from Everybody's Gone to Rapture, with both Jessica Curry and Dan Pinchbeck providing commentary.)

But why is the end of the world taking place in a sleepy rural community? Jessica Curry – the composer of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

see deal Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture - PlayStation 4 $19.99 on Gamestop

“Dan said the most amazing thing to me at the beginning,” she tells me. “He loves games and he’s passionate about post-apocalyptic games, and he said, ‘If we went through this in real life, there’s no way I’d be the square-jawed hero running through saving everybody. I’d be a pile of ash and bone on the floor. Dead.’

“He said, ‘That’s the game I want to make.’ I thought that sounded really, really good. It turns it around completely. There’s no hero in this game that’s going to save everybody. We really wanted to make it feel real and tragic and beautiful and frightening.”

I played Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture for around 30 minutes or so, and by the end, I think it’s all of those things, but starting out on the edge of the village, I was struck by how beautiful and inviting the village of Yaughton is on a summer’s day. Blue skies, full trees, birdsong and butterflies greet you on the edge of town as the story begins. Right in front of you is a red telephone booth; if you approach, it rings, and a disembodied voice tells you to shut down the ‘optical array’ (whatever that is). It’s a jarring intrusion into this otherwise tranquil world. Something bad has happened here.

I cross the road and examine two posters in a small bus shelter perched outside of the village: one’s promoting an amateur production of Peter Pan, the other informs residents of an ‘Emergency Meeting’ being held that night.

Walking further into town, there’s not a soul to be seen. The only sounds are those of nature mixed with the game’s haunting, ethereal score. (Why haven’t the birds died?) You’re free to explore, and I begin poking around some of the nearby properties. Yaughton is a well-to-do place, with many of the homes boasting neatly-manicured lawns, clipped conifers, hanging baskets, and spacious greenhouses around the back. Most of the front doors are locked, but it’s possible to enter some of the houses uninvited using unlocked side- and backdoors, the sort of entrances usually reserved for friends and family members. You feel like an intruder and a voyeur, but isn’t it justified since you’re trying to understand how the world came to an end?

Interiors are richly detailed and deliberately furnished, with decor, furniture and artwork revealing much about the owners in their absence. And it’s a world filled with objects you rarely see in a video game: foldaway tables, three-piece furniture, naff electric fires, double glazing, and bus stops. It’s an idyllic setting – the sort of place you’d seen on a tin of watercolour paints – but also a very ordinary, unremarkable kind of place, and therein I think lies its haunting power. The apocalypse has arrived in a video game yet again, but for the first time it feels like it’s happening on my doorstep.

“ When you’ve got a bunch of people running around blind, wetting themselves on the street in front of Woolworths as the window glass melts – that’s real.”

“It’s still without doubt one of the most terrifying things I’ve seen,” Pinchbeck tells me. “When we were kids in the ‘80s, they made us watch it at school like when we were 11. And the guy who made it said the remit for Threads was to scare a generation of children so badly that when they grew up they couldn’t conceive of pulling the trigger. And it’s terrifying because it’s ordinary; when you’ve got a bunch of people running around blind, wetting themselves on the street in front of Woolworths as the window glass melts – that’s real.”

Like the frozen, drowned, and crystallised worlds of J.G. Ballard, EGTTR is an apocalyptic narrative that isn’t really all that interested in how the world ended; it’s more concerned with the lives of those who died or disappeared.

“ If we’re going to make a game about the apocalypse, let’s make a game about people in the apocalypse."

“And if we’re going to make a game about the apocalypse, let’s make a game about people in the apocalypse, not about the concept of the apocalypse or the big bang of the apocalypse. Let’s make a game saying, ‘When it comes down to it what’s important?’ And this is about people and their relationship with each other. That’s where we should focus.”

It might sound strange to say EGTTR focuses on people when the village of Yaughton is uninhabited, but as you walk around its village green or snoop inside some of its detached houses, something very unusual happens. Swirling beams of golden light appear; they course through the village, zipping down the roads and around bends. Occasionally it accumulates, producing beings of pure light which reenact what were presumably their final moments on the planet. You can’t see what they look like – the light takes on the outline of a person – but you quickly grasp who these people were thanks to the quality of the writing and voice acting. Again, like the visuals, it’s so everyday and conversational.

In one home, I found a mother mourning the death of her children. It was so poignant and harrowing because it felt so real, so recent, but also because it was quietly unfolding in someone’s living room. There was another moment in which a man, again composed entirely of shimmering light, walks slowly up the steps to the village church while damning the god who supposedly dwells there. His faith is totally broken.

“If you have a player who engages heavily with a character, and the character dies, that’s going to fundamentally change their emotional experience and that’s going to change the game,” Pinchbeck tells me. “So why aren’t we saying let’s start with story – how that can profoundly influence the type of experience you have.

“There are lots of designers out there who do lots of really clever and brilliant stuff with systems and mechanics, but what we’re interested in is what emotional experience the player is having and starting much more from a story-, atmosphere- and immersion-driven angle.

“All of the scripts which I’ve written have been very rooted in story. And for that often I’ll go out to literature around that because we’re pushing depth into the story, and emotional depth in story is one thing we still don’t do particularly well as an industry. You can’t easily name the game stories that inspire you. Well, I could write it on the back of a Post-it note. But there aren’t that many out there that are really doing it. We want to go back and produce games that are narratively deep, rich and as interesting as books.”