Everybody's Gone to the Rapture: writing a score for the end of the world

Silence is rare in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture – which is strange because everybody is dead.

This elegiac adventure game, set in a rural area of Shropshire, imagines the end of humanity coming, not as a nuclear bang, but as a soft, almost seductive whimper. The player finds themselves in an abandoned village shortly after a devastating event of some kind, and by exploring the buildings, pathways and woodlands, must try to piece together what has happened.

With no characters around (except for a few sequences in which their ghosts seem to appear as holographic visions telling portions of the backstory), Rapture relies very heavily on environmental sound and music. And Brighton-based developer The Chinese Room has taken a highly complex and ambitious approach to its audio.

The most noticeable element from the start however, is the gorgeous orchestral score, composed by co-founder Jessica Curry. The game’s themes and visuals are heavily inspired by the “cosy catastrophe” fiction of John Wyndham and John Christopher, using idyllic English environments – tumbling cottages, country pubs and leafy woodland glades – to conjure a pastoral apocalypse, which the plays into.

“I wanted to create something timeless,” says Curry. “The score is based around the pastoral ideal, this nostalgia for an England that never existed. It plays on the Englishness of Elgar and Vaughan Williams.”

What we hear when we explore the village are these sweeping orchestral themes, loaded with luscious strings and the sort of romantic emotional yearning that characterises the Enigma Variations and Lark Ascending – it is music inextricably tied to the English countryside. To get it right, Curry embarked on a full music production, hiring a string and woodwind orchestra, a violin soloist and for the haunting choral moments, two full, highly experienced choirs, Metro Voices and London Voices.

The music is the message

Importantly, however, the music does not simply play like a traditional cinematic score – it is interactive. “Some is triggered traditionally like filmic cues,” explains Curry. “But some of it is procedural and triggered by what the player does. Then you have particular songs relating to specific characters.”

Of course, dynamic music has been part of video game soundtrack design for 40 years, ever since the famously heartbeat-like Space Invaders tune began to speed up as the aliens approached the bottom of the screen. Since then, composers have experimented with modular soundtracks, switching between different emotional timbres as the player moved between quiet periods of exploration and tense fighting sequences. Musical games like Rez have allowed players to help build the audio through gameplay actions, while titles like Max Payne 3 and Journey have brilliantly used dynamic scores to heighten the emotional impact in very different ways.

Rapture, is doing all of these things, but due to the lack of characters in the game, it is also fulfilling a much more directive function, guiding the player around the map, and filling in story details. Each of the previous residents of the village has their own theme, which weaves into the audio as you reach locations meaningful to them. In this way, the score underlines the environmental clues you find, such as notes, signs, and audio recordings.

The Chinese Room was also keen for the score to function as a piece of modern classical music in its own right. The symphonic sections are exquisite in this regard, but it also brings in choral themes, as well as discreet songs which sound like Elizabethan ballads. The studio’s other founder, Dan Pinchbeck wrote the lyrics, which hark back to the sort of languid melancholia we see in Shakespeare’s plays.

Again, the words play back into the themes of the game. ““It’s not pastiche, we’re trying to use it to make something new,” says Pinchbeck. “We wanted to do something where, if you stripped all of the dialogue out of the game and just have the music, you would still get a really powerful emotional journey.”

Sound affects

Working alongside the music, audio designer Adam Hay has also experimented with ambient effects, carefully modifying a range of countryside sounds. “I think there’s something really comforting in that,” he says. “The whole world is still moving around you. There are loads of wind sounds that are all dynamically mixed and changed as the game progresses to capture the mood of each specific area. I really wanted to do something that might make you just stop for a moment and drink in the atmosphere of the world.”

Hay has also drawn procedural audio from the score, so that snippets of music get turned into weird sound effects as you approach important areas, adding a more sinister undertone. “I took Jessica’s music and broke it down into these decayed grimey tape loops,” he says. “The game sort of procedurally rebuilds these elements as you go uncover more scenes and story elements. Jess really pushed that system forward, it was a huge experiment but a very rewarding one. We sort of just kept running with it. We came away from the music recording sessions with loads of elements and chords to feed into it, and it just bridged that gap between the ‘weirdly processed’ and ‘pure organic’ sounds.”

Importantly, this musical experimentation was going on from the beginning, and helped inform the rest of the game. “We got the music script and sound effects running at the same time as grey boxing [a method of designing levels and environments with basic scenic objects] – there’s a big interflow between those disciplines right at the beginning of the project,” says Pinchbeck. “We’re not making three-quarters of the game and then bringing in a composer and saying ‘put some music to that’. The early music tests that Jess did were influencing the environmental art, and the art was influencing the script.”

It’s a fascinating time for game music. Rockstar has done amazing work, not just with its pitch-perfect Grand Theft Auto soundtracks but with the way it has brought in different artists to produce modular scores for games like Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3. US-based composer Austin Wintory has brought emotion and drama to games like Monaco and Journey, and post-rock outfit 65daysofstatic has provided the epic No Man’s Sky with an endless cosmic audio experience. Through many years of experimentation, developers are realising that music is as much a storytelling component as dialogue, and that it can be interactive and procedural in ways cinematic scores never can be.

“Games are such an amazing space for a composer,” says Curry. “They allow so much freedom. Everyone is trying to write truly interactive music, but it has become a technical obsession for me. Rapture is an experiment in asking: can you guide the player around, gently interact with them but still write really strong uncompromising music? It’s been such a labour of love. I’ve loved it, I’ve hated it and everything in between.”

• Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is available on PS4 in August. A soundtrack CD is also being released separately.
  

The Mourning Tree

Jessica Curry talks us through her favourite sequence from the score.

“Each of the six main characters has their own theme in the game and this is Wendy’s. I wanted to give her a theme that reflected the softer side of her character. Wendy has been forced to become tough through circumstance – she is a pensioner and I wanted to write a theme that evoked Wendy as a young woman, when she was still full of hope, but a theme that also explains why she has become the more embattled person that she is now.

“There is a melancholy and a beauty in the music and also a rural, folky feel that absolutely ties her to the village of Yaughton where the game is set. Birds are incredibly important thematically in the game and Dan Pinchbeck and I always like to seed little secrets and layers into the lyrics – this song is no exception and it’s perhaps my favourite theme.”