Everybody's Gone to the Rapture has taken quite a beating from reviewers for having a slow movement speed. It's undoubtedly affected its Metacritic rating as several review sites have cited it the poor pacing as a detractor to the experience. What many of these reviewers didn't know is that you can run in the game, it just isn't obvious.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture developer The Chinese Room and published an entry on its blog where it explains how players can run in the game. It's as simple as holding R2.
The thing is that The Chinese Room decided during development that fast movement in the game should be toned down for the sake of delivering a low tempo adventure. Instead of R2 instantly taking you to top speeds, it's a gradual process. This has made it unclear that you can run to many players, but what really has caused most confusion is the lack of an R2 entry for the controller mapping screen. The Chinese Room explained why this is the case with the following:
A couple of weeks before the game went to final, Santa Monica did a last round of playtesting. At this point, the game included an autosprint. That meant that if you kept moving, you’d gradually ramp up to a run speed, specifically to deal with issues with how long potential back-tracking could take, given the game’s non-linearity. The problem was, playtesters wanted to be able to trigger it themselves. It didn’t matter about the speed, it was the psychology, the choice.
So together with Santa Monica, we made a late call. We replaced the autosprint with aN R2 trigger hold, keeping the gentle ramp up to main speed. This then needed testing, because it potentially threw out all of the pacing we’d been working on for the last year, plus could cause issues with accidentally parkouring into places you couldn’t escape from, creating game-breaking bugs. All this took time.
The Chinese Room has recognized that this small mistake has affected its critical success. Although it was intended to be the PS4's biggest indie title this Summer, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture now stands at 76 Metacritic with mixed reviews, a surprising outcome to one of Sony's most marketed indie exclusives.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture has other issues, so it'd be unfair to say that this issue is the sole reason for its failure to achieve widespread acclaim. However, it certainly has played a part, and there's a lesson to be learned here for other developers considering dramatic changes during the final weeks leading up to a game release.
