You can run in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture - here's how!
In fact one of the only issues we had with the game in our review was that the walking speed was so slow, something which became an issue from time to time as the levels are large and we definitely wanted to make sure we explored everything we could. Well it turns out the developers were well aware of this potential problem and had even made provisions for it. They'd just... forgotten to tell anyone else.
In a post release article, The Chinese Room's Creative Director Dan Pinchbeck had some things he wanted to say, and they were mainly about the walking speed. The big revelation - you can now and could always run:
So why don't we know? Well:
It seems this very specific way of sprinting, by holding down an input, came to the game quite late after some final testing. Early playtesters wanted to feel the feedback of pressing something for effect, whereas the developers had originally decided that just moving forward consistently would add to your speed over time. That system makes more sense in the streamlined world of Rapture and many players would have chanced on it eventually, but the change made it invisible.
And then The Chinese Room didn't have time to include it in the list of controls on the main menu screen or implement an onscreen suggestion when the game proper started. Their bad, as Pinchbeck admits, and he also knows that it has been picked up as a criticism.
Still, the word is out now and new players will have a much easier time of it. In truth, running around isn't the ideal way to play Rapture but if you think you've missed something and need to cover a lot of ground it can be useful. We've tested the run button in game and it works as advertised, though there's quite a lag between pressing the button and getting going to just keep R2 held down. We'd still recommend walking for the most part and fully soaking in the atmosphere of this beautiful and bewildering world.
