I've been staying in London on and off over the past year or so, and I've become acquainted with the English color palette: Skies of pale slate and rose, wan sunlight. The land is blonde and green, and its flowers are elegant, mute: pollen-dust of bright yellow, blossoms of white lace.
There is a particular shade of blue -- royal -- that people often paint their doors or garages, and there is the siren-red of phone boxes. I live on a heath, and often red city buses pass against the backdrop of silvereen clouds, seas of blanched waving grasses, the graphite line of a steeple in the distance.
I came to Brighton in the south of the country to visit The Chinese Room, house of thoughtful, atmospheric games like Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. To get there I walk from the train station down a steep hill, alongside sand-colored stone walls drenched in ivy. At the peak of the hill I can see the English countryside in the distance, a green patchwork quilt swelling from amid ruddy shingled rooftops.
The studio's currently working on Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a first-person exploration game for PlayStation 4 somewhat in the vein of their previous work -- "It's an open-world, story-driven game, taking the trajectory of Dear Esther and Machine for Pigs and trying to do something new," says Dan Pinchbeck, the studio's creative director. "We're really interested in looking at the unique properties of storytelling in games."
I'm about to see a demo, and the screen currently shows me one of those distinctively English skies, a field of gently-nodding wildflowers, humble fenceposts. We're surrounded by ambient sound and tiny motes of color and light, and somewhere in the distance a phone is ringing. I've seen those flowers before, I say. Goldenrod? Marigold?
"Cow parsley," director Jessica Curry tells me. She chose all the game's wildlife. It was important that they all be native plants.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is set in Shropshire, in 1984. "The 1980s were really interesting -- pre-mobile, pre-internet, one of the last times when the world was still remote," Pinchbeck reflects. "It's coming up on the tail end of the Cold War, there's eco-paranoia in these little remote communities. In these little, remote communities, you can have all of these apocalyptic visions -- we really wanted to play with a sense of being very, very English, and with how normal people might cope."
English people seem interested in defining Englishness. It's almost like a cultural norm everyone agrees upon. I can define being English when I pull a friend from here into a conversation and I begin to compliment him profusely and he looks like I've struck him. Or when everyone crowds onto a rush hour tube, feining stern interest in their commuter newspaper so that no one else trying to enter the train might brush up against their bodies. It's a line of black umbrellas, sighing in unison at the morose announcement of a train delay.
The team's been inspired by the essence of the British wartime spirit, as well as the work of science fiction writers like John Christopher -- his 1958 novel The Death of Grass follows a civil servant and his engineer friend, crossing the countryside as a mysterious virus destroys all the grass. "Cozy, catastrophe fiction," Pinchbeck explains. "'Oh, that's terrible -- let's put a cup of tea on.' There's a quiet acceptance."
"I think we always associate 'heroism' with America," Curry adds.
"As long as we keep saying 'everything's normal,' everything's normal," Pinchbeck continues. "That's a very English thing as well, so that felt like a very interesting thing to play with."
The sound of the phonebox ringing off-screen creates an uneasy sense of home in an empty world, I think. Classic "post-apocalyptic" video games are about ash piles, nuclear mutants. The post-apocalyptic vision that's been laid out by the likes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Fallout 3 has been perfectly established, Pinchbeck says, and there is little more to add. Further, his favorite part of these tragic brown-and-gray landscapes are their character vignettes: What he most remembers about 4A Games' Metro 2033 is a scene of a girl and her father fishing in irradiated water, and she asks him if they can catch fish -- and if they can catch cancer.
"Could you make a game from those small moments," Pinchbeck poses. "And is that actually a more interesting apocalypse? What if we took a remote valley in the 1980s, and we effectively 'scatter' story into the world and let the player loose in it?"
"It's about trusting the player, isn't it," Curry adds. She says she finds the overt signposting of many modern games unpleasant, and sees the cult success of Dear Esther as proof people want to take on less heavy-handed, more complex stories -- and that there is no divide between supposed 'high' and 'low' art. "We've had as many emails from teenage boys as we have from the 'games intelligensia,' because [Dear Esther] was a human story," she says.
Pinchbeck grew up in Sheffield during the 1980s. By the time he was 11 years old, the children at his school heard about threats of nuclear action. "The 'world was going to end,'" he recalls. "It was really frightening. But part of the remit was to scare an entire generation of children, so they'd never put their finger on the button. The idea the world was going to end wasn't this abstract thing. Post-Cold War anxiety reared its head and AIDS was emerging, so it was -- 'if we don't get nuked we're going to die of this disease that no one understands in any way, shape or form.' And because it was pre-internet, you had to rely on a very small number of sources for information."
Pinchbeck particularly remembers a hurricane in 1987 that hit a small village and cut off most of the south coast.
"When you think about 'the end of the world,' the village is the world, in a way," Curry says.