Thechineseroom at work on Dear Esther successor

Indie studio thechineseroom is at work on the spiritual successor to its immensely popular game Dear Esther.

Titled Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the new game apes the story-driven nature of its predecessor, and centres around an apocalyptic setting, reports Beefjack.

“The concept of it is this almost ’60s-’70s Brit science fiction – this John Wyndham, John Christopher kind of thing – of how the end of the world would be responded to in a rural English location,” creative director Dan Pinchbeck told the website.

Made with CryEngine 3, the PC game’s finer points remain a mystery, but it will only allow an hour of play at a time, and will end the game after the time is up, making each sitting with the game an individual experience in its own right.

Seemingly no-less experimental that Dear Esther, first-person open-world title Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture will offer in-game characters as ‘memory traces’, which may or may not be realised as physical beings. And says Pinchbeck, it can still be played without ever moving the main character, pointing to a less than typical experience.

“We’re looking at making it much more physially interactive [than Dear Esther], so you can manipulate objects, you can open and close doors,” Pinchbeck says. “[And] without it being too much like easter egg rewards, the game will reward you for exploring and interacting. So there are places which are not obvious to get to, and you have to do things in order to get to them.”

The game is due for release in summer next year.