So there are things you can do in terms of how the narrative is structured and how the player relates to the structure of that narrative and how time relates to all of that, that you can't do in another medium. 'One of the things we really, really wanted to explore with Rapture was the uniqueness of storytelling in games. 'Time still plays a fairly central role in the game - it's just the time-locked stuff is gone,' he clarifies, though he hasn't sorted exactly how this will be handled. Pinchbeck notes that Rapture will still be non-linear and set during the final moments before the apocalypse. Your time's up.' It's an artificial conceit that doesn't necessarily produce a good player experience.' Time limits, Pinchbeck notes, are 'probably more suited to an arcade-style game, but not really good for a non-linear story-driven drama.' How far can you get? How much can you explore? Imagine reading a novel and you're really into it, and 30 pages before the end someone comes up and takes it out of your hand and goes, 'I'm afraid that's it. It would be almost like kind of a Groundhog Day or 12:01-type thing where you've got an hour. 'Originally, when we started the game off it was going to be an hour long for each playthrough. When asked about this now, Pinchbeck laughs, 'Yeah, that's gone.'

When studio head Dan Pinchbeck discussed Rapture last summer, it was said to feature a Majora's Mask-esque time mechanic that would constrain each playthrough to about an hour.

The evocative title aims to explore rural Shropshire an hour before the end of the world. Last week we did a postmortem on The Chinese Room's experimental horror sequel Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and as fascinating as it was to hear all the decisions that went into developing that, I couldn't help wonder about the Brighton-based studio's upcoming PS4-exclusive first-person exploration game, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.

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