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From its opening shot, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture shows precisely how its three-year development was spent. It's an absolutely gorgeous PlayStation 4 title that puts its bucolic visuals front and centre - where CryEngine is tasked to render a picturesque Shropshire village. Developer The Chinese Room uses the engine's superb lighting and post effects to ramp up the atmosphere. But with such a determined drive towards photo-realism, has its frame-rate been overlooked?Let's start with the basics. The game renders at a native 1080p, giving the countryside setting a real chance to shine. The sprawl of valleys, trees and provincial houses are sharp from a distance, while post-process anti-aliasing removes a lot of the pixel crawl you'd usually see while panning the camera. A pass of temporal AA helps reduce flickering on trees here - we suspect an iteration of the excellent, refined version of SMAA T1x found in Ryse may well be present here.
But the end results are perhaps less crisp than we'd expect from a full 1080p title. With motion blur added too, even gentle nudges to the camera really soften the image as the temporal AA engages. In fact, you can see the algorithm change just as you start to move, as if flicking an on-off switch to the game's overall clarity. Fortunately, holding the camera steady means these effects settle down, and some impressive details come into focus.
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