DISCLAIMER: Contains MAJOR spoilers for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
CONTENT WARNING: The following article discusses mature topics, such as mass murder, suicide and euthanasia. Reader discretion is advised.
Over a year ago, when I wrote about Jessica Curry’s career, I mentioned how Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture has always held a dear place in my heart as it helped me deal with some pretty tough moments of my life. And since Game Music Hub came into being, it’s been on my mind to write about that score.
But a combination of not knowing how to tackle it and my own reluctance to put myself in a vulnerable position kept it from showing up during that first year of the website. But now, over a year later, and in the wake of its seventh anniversary, I’ve decided to finally write about it.
Rapture has always been a deceptively complicated score to talk about, mainly because of how tied it is to the narrative of the game; Jessica Curry snuck in so many details in here that subtly allude to characters and relationships, so if I was ever going to write about it, I knew it’d be an undertaking.
And an undertaking it was. So much so that I missed its original deadline by a week. This is the first of two articles devoted to picking apart Rapture’s musical storytelling. The second article will be coming out next week.
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture takes place in 1984 in the fictional English village of Yaughton, which is completely deserted. The player explores the place as they investigate why everyone seems to have disappeared. Fragments of mysterious light scattered around Yaughton reveal memories of the events leading up to said disappearance. As it turns out, the mysterious light that has been showing you what happened to everyone is also responsible for taking them.
The game is structured around six chapters, each focusing around six major characters in the story, with the two most important ones being Kate and Stephen. Although these POV (point-of-view) characters are the main focus of each chapter, the player can find side storylines and individual scenes focusing on completely different characters sprinkled throughout the game.
I’ll try not to delve too deep into the story, but just so that we’re on the same page, because it’s necessary to understand what the music is doing, let’s talk about the main POV characters for a bit.
The first chapter is centered around Father Jeremy Wheeler, the village’s priest. Her sister, Mary Wheeler, was married to another POV character, Frank, prior to the events of the game, until her death.
The second chapter focuses on Wendy Boyles, an elderly woman, deeply Catholic and an avid bird watcher. She lost her husband, Eddie, prior to the events of the game, and is very opinionated towards her son Stephen’s marriage. After Mary’s death, she harbors deep resentment towards Father Jeremy and her brother, Frank.
The third chapter centers on Frank Appleton, Wendy’s brother. The death of her wife Mary weighs on him. He owns a farm and spends his days tending to his cows and crops.
The fourth chapter is about Lizzie Graves. She owns the Lakeside Holiday Camp, a small resort outside of Yaughton. She’s married to a mechanic named Robert. At least a decade before the events depicted, Lizzie and Stephen, Wendy’s son, were in a relationship, and were almost married, before he left Yaughton to become a scientist. After his return to Yaughton, and encouraged by Wendy, she starts an affair with Stephen, kept secret from Robert, and from Stephen’s wife, Kate.
The fifth chapter is for Stephen Appleton, one of the two central characters in the story’s events. Him and his wife, Kate Collins, are scientists, and have only recently arrived in Yaughton (it was years since Stephen was last there) to work at the Valis Observatory outside the village. Sometime after their arrival, Stephen rekindles his relationship with Lizzie, and keeps it from Kate. During an event referred to as the “Alignment,” Kate and Stephen discover a pattern of light in the sky that, after some time of research, arrives on the village via the observatory’s instruments. It soon starts spreading throughout Yaughton and seemingly killing people around town. Stephen resolves that the pattern is deadly and infectious enough to spread around the world. He sets out to contain it before it can kill more people.
The final, and shortest, chapter in the game, centers around Kate. Unlike the rest of the cast, she’s American, and has come to Yaughton for the first time with Stephen to work at the Observatory. The villagers being quite conservative and prickly about outsiders, they don’t respond well to her arrival, and she quickly feels isolated from everyone else. She’s the one who, in trying to study the pattern of light, lets it into Yaughton. Throughout the game you find recordings of her research as she tries to understand what it is, what it’s doing, and why it’s doing it, with the major revelations coming during her chapter.
All of the characters are deeply interconnected, creating an intricate web of storytelling that reveals itself little by little over the course of the game. Jessica Curry uses these character connections as a way to link musical ideas together in creative and smart ways. Every character in Rapture has a leitmotivic idea that helps identify them musically, even if it sometimes isn’t a proper theme (that is, a fully-fledged melody), or even a motif (a shorter musical phrase).
These ideas come in three forms: themes, musical instruments and songs. The chapters for all six characters feature a distinctive song that recurs throughout, and then fragments of them sometimes go on to appear in later chapters if the respective character appears again. Themes are the standard way a score acknowledges characters, and there are five fully-fledged thematic melodies in the score, for all but one of the main ones; although not always, these themes are often related to a specific song. On top of that, three POV characters are distinctly identified by the use of very specific musical instruments in the music.
These complex connections are part of what makes this score so powerful, no matter how many times you listen to the music or play the game. I’ll attempt to uncover these hidden complexities, and help you understand, other than just how ravishing the music is, why I think this score packs such a powerful emotional punch.
This first part of the article will only focus on the six songs used in the score and their connection to the main POV characters.
The Songs of the Apocalypse
Voices are a core component of Jessica Curry’s music in this game, with the combined power of the London Voices and Metro Voices, as well as featured soloist Elin Manahan Thomas, lending their talent for some stirring vocal passages.
They aren’t singing wordless melodies or random vocalizations, however. Rapture’s writer Dan Pinchbeck wrote five sets of lyrics for use in the score, with Curry subsequently turning them into songs.
Each song strongly correlates with each of the six POV characters in the game. In fact, two of these songs open the chapters for their respective characters. The lyrics speak about their past, their mental state, or even their character arc within the game. In some cases, the lyrics are even adapted as dialogue for the characters themselves.
Jeremy: Psalm 13
Father Jeremy is the only one who doesn’t get a properly defined “song.” Instead, Curry takes three verses of Psalm 13 from the Bible and sprinkles it throughout several cues.
How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? For ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
How long shall I take counsel in mine soul? Having sorrow in mine heart daily? How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and hear me, O Lord, my God. Lighten mine eyes lest I sleep the sleep of Death.
Source: The Book of Psalms; Psalm 13; King James version
However, as the player roams through Yaughton during his chapter, they can hear faint echoes of a choir singing passages from it. On the album, this chorale is presented in its full form as For Ever. The only other piece like it is the end credits cue, which will be discussed later.
Otherwise, Psalm 13 is exclusively set to a melody, which is Jeremy’s theme, and is usually sung by Elin Manahan Thomas’ solo vocals. You can find examples of this in tracks like The Sleep of Death, which scores Father Jeremy’s final walk to the church near the end of his chapter (shown in the video above at 0:51), or A Beautiful Morning, which scores Frank’s final memory at the end of his chapter.
On the surface, it makes sense that the lyrics used for the priest are from the Bible, moreover that the music so closely resembles liturgical music, but the choice actually goes deeper than that. Psalm 13, which, at its core, is about the questioning of one’s beliefs in the face of adversity, directly speaks to Jeremy’s growing anguish over seeing Yaughton’s inhabitants disappear.
In a village so deeply religious, he knows how much he can be a pillar of the community, so him being completely powerless to stop what’s happening breaks him apart. In his final moments, shown at the very end of his chapter and scored by All the Earth, he pleads for God to help him. Curiously, Thomas sings a different psalm from the Bible altogether– verse 4 from Psalm 19. This wasn’t its first appearance in the score, nor will it be its last. Psalm 19’s use in the music will be discussed later.
As the light claims Father Jeremy, the choir overtakes Thomas and mournfully sings Psalm 13 set to a variation of Jeremy’s theme. The weight of this moment is carried almost in its entirety by Jamie Ballard’s harrowing performance and Jessica Curry’s score.
Wendy: The Mourning Tree
Wendy’s chapter opens to the warm verses of The Mourning Tree, beautifully sung by Thomas:
I passed the day at the mourning tree,
where the river’s sorrows run deep.
And all at once a host of birds
did settle and nest around me.In their song I heard your song,
I heard the bomber’s drone.
Beneath those birds and the swaying wheat,
I heard you coming home.Oh, my love, where did you fly
after you came home to me?
Like the nightjar you left me here
to nest in the mourning tree.Lyrics by Dan Pinchbeck
Wendy is a difficult woman, and is widely regarded as the town’s judgy old lady who’s in everyone’s business all the time. But just like everyone else in Yaughton, she carries her own baggage, with a history that, while doesn’t justify her flaws, paints her in a much more sympathetic light.
The death of her husband, Eddie, is shown to be continuously in Wendy’s mind, especially near the final moments of her life. Her husband, Eddie, was a war veteran stationed in Italy during an unspecified war. While never vocalized, it’s implied that his passing tore at her soul.
The Mourning Tree is the thing that does a fair amount of job in selling the hidden pain in Wendy’s heart. While the music is cheerful, with a prancing piano arpeggio and luscious orchestrations, the lyrics are far darker than that. The song tells the story of a person mourning for their lover; you wouldn’t even need the references to birds and war to know it’s talking about Wendy and Eddie.
The song is never far behind whenever Wendy is in a scene, for example that intimate, heartfelt conversation between her and Father Jeremy near the end of Wendy’s chapter. The two are finally able to patch their rocky relationship to the sound of All of My Birds. Thomas soulfully sings a slower setting of The Mourning Tree before being overtaken by the full choir in a rapturous statement of a motif previously heard in Liquid Light; as an aside, the choir contrapuntally singing “I heard you coming home” to the motif on the strings is spine-tingling.
Frank: Carry Me Back to Her Arms
The song for Wendy’s brother, Frank Appleton, is probably my favorite of the bunch. Carry Me Back to Her Arms plays at the start of Frank’s chapter in the game:
A-roving we went, my true love and I,
amongst the corn and the maize,
when Death leaned in with his sickle and clock
and swept my true love away.I have followed the nightjar home to her bed,
I have followed the sound of her heart.
Over field and valley I’ve counted them fly,
and the seventh is always apart.So a-roving I’ll go through my fields once more
with my ear to the maize and the corn.
And wait for the day that Death comes for me
to carry me back to her arms.To her arms, to her arms, to her arms, boys!
To carry me back to her arms.And wait for the day that Death comes for me
to carry me back to her arms.Lyrics by Dan Pinchbeck
They are inherently sad and melancholic, as everything is in this game, but within that, there’s a twinge of resignation, and even bitter irony. Strangely, at face value, the lyrics read like a tavern song more than a choral piece of music. But it does fit Frank’s dry demeanor to a tee.
It’s full appearance in-game happens at the start of his chapter (shown in the video at 5:26). Carry Me Back to Her Arms, especially coming off of Wendy’s heartwrenching final memory, feels like such a breath of fresh air. The sight of Frank’s farm coming in over the horizon with the male choir singing this beautifully pastoral melody is one of those special moments that hit in the way that only games can do. The first time I played through the game, I set the controller down, just processing the absolute beauty pouring into my eyes and ears. Just captivating stuff.
Like The Mourning Tree, Carry Me Back to Her Arms talks about a person losing their lover, this time through the literal lens of Death coming in to take her. The singer (singers in this case) fruitlessly searches for her, but instead resigns to wait for their own death so they can be reunited with her in the afterlife. Frank’s grief over his wife Mary’s death is more transparently portrayed in the game, particularly as it makes up a storyline involving two other POV characters– Jeremy, Mary’s brother, and Wendy, Frank’s sister.
Over the course of the game, it’s revealed that Mary was euthanized, implied to be at her request, by Father Jeremy, after a long time of living through an unspecified chronic illness. Wendy, a deeply religious woman, resents both Frank and Jeremy for this.
Frank’s grief comes from the loss of his wife but, more importantly, comes from his inability to be by her side at the moment of her death; consumed by fear, he went to the pub instead. He carries the regret of that moment with him and, in his final moments, he talks to Mary, telling her how he wants to face the end of his life with her, as he couldn’t do it for her.
Thus, waiting for the day that Death comes for him to carry him back to Mary’s arms takes on two meanings– the first, him missing Mary and longing to be with her again, and the second, the failure to honor his wife’s dying wish, to be with her when she needed him most, and him wanting to do right by that in the moments of his own death.
What’s also curious, though not entirely surprising, about Carry Me Back to Her Arms is how much imagery it shares with The Mourning Tree. Yes, they are both about people grieving for their loved ones, but they both use birds, natural landscapes and farms to convey their individual stories.
The reason it’s not surprising is because, after all, Wendy and Frank are siblings. Wendy is an avid bird watcher and Frank is a farmer; his farm is the primary location of his chapter. That their music share so much DNA is only natural.
Lizzie: Clouds and Starlight
Lizzie’s song doubles as a fictional lullaby called Clouds and Starlight:
Sleeping baby on the wing,
clouds and starlight, starlight, starlight.
Fly to dreams and morning’s brim,
starlight, sleep and love.Sleeping baby, shadowed dust,
clouds and starlight, starlight, starlight.
When we’re called to go, we must,
into starlight, sleep and love.Lyrics by Dan Pinchbeck
The game’s story being presented nonlinearly, and all of its subplots being so interconnected means that the players can sometimes get information about characters long after their chapter is over. One such example is the late-game reveal that Lizzie was pregnant.
Lizzie’s chapter differs from the others in that it doesn’t have the narrative focus that the other five do; it almost seems to serve the double purpose of using Lizzie’s POV to get her perspective, but also to get a better sense of the state of Yaughton’s inhabitants and how they’re reacting to what’s happening around them. This is why, despite being Lizzie’s chapter, you get a prominent focus on secondary characters like Rachel, Rhys, Sean or Diana.
What this means is that, when taking into account the chapter’s scatterbrained structure and the game withholding Lizzie’s pregnancy until much later, it’s initially hard to find a connection between Lizzie and Clouds and Starlight. In fact, the song prior to it’s full appearance at the end of the chapter, Clouds and Starlight only appears at the beginning of it as a small chant featuring an alternate version of the lyrics; you can find this at 9:00 into the video.
Sleeping baby, darling child.
When you wake, you will be mine.Lyrics by Dan Pinchbeck
Interestingly too, the chapter’s end isn’t Lizzie dying like it’s been with every other POV character up to that point. Halfway through Frank’s chapter, it’s revealed that Stephen has another character order an air strike in order to starve the Pattern of its food (living beings) and kill it before it can continue expanding. One early morning, three planes fly over the valley, dropping six bombs of lethal gas. Everyone still alive in Yaughton dies, and at the end of Lizzie’s chapter, we witness Rachel and everyone staying at Lizzie’s Holiday Camp succumbing to it; Rachel whispers the lullaby to a baby abandoned by his parents after a sleepless night. The choir then picks up the lullaby as the entire Main Hall vanishes. So I wouldn’t blame you for initially thinking the lullaby was actually related to Rachel, who previously in the chapter had Lizzie tell her that “You’d be a good mum.”
But it isn’t about Rachel. At the train station, halfway through Stephen’s chapter and very close to the game’s finale, we find Lizzie’s final memory. She dies waiting for Stephen so the two can escape Yaughton together. Among her final words, she says she’s not waiting for him anymore, that she has to go because “I’ve got to think about the baby.” While it’s implied Stephen knew about the pregnancy, and even more implied that the baby is his, it comes as a surprise to the player. Seconds later, the planes fly by and the bombs drop, ending Lizzie and her baby’s life.
The orchestra swells up with an instrumental statement of Clouds and Starlight (I Hope You Find Peace on the album), and it’s then that the connection is made– Clouds and Starlight was always about Lizzie and her unborn child. The emotional punch that this moment packs cannot be understated. In retrospect, the reveal paints a very different picture of Lizzie.
Like every other character in Rapture, there’s a palpable sadness in Lizzie, even if it’s only occasionally brought to the foreground. Her marriage is framed as almost non-existent; her husband is described as being neglectful and a drunk. And then there’s her affair with Stephen.
I have to give the game major props for, even under the circumstances, there’s a lot of sincerity in the relationship between the two; you can tell through the writing and performances that the two care deeply about each other and that, in some ways, they make each other happy, which is a far cry from how extramarital affairs tend to be portrayed– they can be emotionally complex, not just inherently malicious.
And that emotional complexity is made even more apparent after realizing that there was a baby in the midst of all of this.
I’ll talk more about the actual melody of Clouds and Starlight in next week’s article, but for now I’ll mention how well it captures Lizzie’s many emotional dimensions. It captures her tenderness and caring nature towards the community she’s a part of; it captures the love she shares with Stephen; it captures the deep remorse within her, equally caused by her relationship with Stephen, and the larger shadow that both of their spouses cast over them.
Stephen: The End of All Things
The End of All Things, which is Stephen’s song, is probably the most interesting to pick apart:
Underneath the butterfly gardens,
here I have buried all of my past.
But the lost will come to remember,
the Sun will not cast its light.And the stars will fall around us,
and the embers cast from our eyes,
binding us both to the end of all things
and the coming of the light.Lyrics by Dan Pinchbeck
This one is far more abstract than the other four. Instead of talking about someone, or to someone, The End of All Things muses about the ending of the world, as both an allegory for death and as a concrete event, with the Pattern consuming all of Yaughton.
Stephen and Kate, at the center of it all, take diametrically opposing approaches to dealing with the Pattern. While Kate embraces it as she comes to understand it, Stephen fears it, believing it to be a deadly force that will spread around the world and kill everyone if not taken care of.
I know I’ve said this about pretty much all of the characters in the game, but Stephen is a complicated man. Over the course of the game, we understand the relationship he has with the other characters in the game– the distance he keeps with his mother, Wendy, the animosity he has for Frank, the love he shares for both Kate and Lizzie, and how complicated it is for him to reconcile both of those feelings; we even understand his complicated past with Eddie, his father, who was an absent figure throughout his childhood
We also come to know Stephen as a very impulsive man, one with a temper so volatile that he constantly seems on the verge of punching someone; this behavior is only exacerbated as he’s increasingly unable to contain the Pattern from escaping the quarantine over the village.
In a strange way, The End of All Things speaks of the apocalypse with a ferocity that befits Stephen very well. And yet, its melody is so profoundly melancholic. Where the lyrics speak of the death of the stars, the minor key, steadily descending melody is fragile and openly sentimental in a way that Stephen doesn’t often get to be.
This quality of the melody (which is Stephen’s theme too, and will be discussed at length in next week’s article) is better shown during the memory where Stephen first reconnects with Lizzie after coming back to Yaughton, which is scored by the cue that starts at 1:13 into The Manifestation from the album. The End of All Things plays softly on piano, with a tender countermelody on flute; this cue, coupled with Lu Corfield and Oliver Dimsdale’s performances as Lizzie and Stephen, create such a warm and intimate atmosphere around the memory.
But, living up to its lyrics, The End of All Things can also be forceful. The end of Stephen’s chapter takes the player deep into a bunker where Stephen hunkered in while the air strike killed everyone in Yaughton. In it, he waited for word that it was over, that his plan had worked, that the Pattern had died and the death of every villager hadn’t been for nothing.
But all he got was silence, endless silence. He’s almost certain that he’s failed, that the Pattern has survived and has gone out into the world. Fully prepared to kill himself to prevent the Pattern from feeding off of him too, he douses himself and the ground around him in gasoline. During his final memory, The End of All Things plays in its entirety, with Elin Manahan Thomas taking up the first two verses.
At the last second, the Pattern reaches him there, and in the light… conjures up an image of his wife, Kate. Amid the shock, he drops the ignited lighter he’d been holding in his hand.
As he burns to his death, the choir and strings burst in with an explosion of anguish and sorrow, as if the music is in pain seeing him die. It’s almost poetic seeing him succumb to the flames with a chorus of people singing about the ending of the world.
And indeed, just as Stephen dissolves into specks of light and joins the Pattern, the sopranos from the choir, Thomas’s solo vocals and a solo violin take over, solemnly finishing off with the song’s final two verses.
This memory is probably the best showcase of how superbly complex The End of All Things is. In the span of two minutes, the music goes through a wide array of emotions to support the memory it’s scoring, from resignation, to anguish, to peaceful resolution. And the song is nothing less than beautiful, melody and lyrics; even at its most intensely dour and harrowing, the game strives to find beauty within the darkness, and so the score follows suit.
The End of All Things is, to me, the most striking representation of that balance.
Kate: The Light We Cast
The Light We Cast scores a lot of the game’s final chapter, that devoted for Kate:
Now everything has come to rest.
The end has come and I am not afraid.
We travel on towards a new beginning.
We slip away and we are unafraid.We’re born apart, the waters carry us.
An endless dark, the sovereign galaxies.
The light we cast creates a bridge
that guides the way across the ageless deep.I see them all, I see them dancing
in the endless numbers of the light.I love you in the ebbing of the tide.
I love you in the quiet immanence.
I love you in the patterned butterflies.Lyrics by Dan Pinchbeck
The player is transported to the Observatory grounds, where, as they explore, they uncover Kate’s recordings of her studying and understanding the Pattern. Within them, Kate grows ever so increasingly attached to it.
Kate is the most mysterious of the main POV characters, as she’s the one whose backstory is explained the least. She’s an American scientist whom Stephen met when he traveled to study abroad. They eventually fell in love, got married, and set up to work at the Observatory outside of Yaughton.
Aside from Stephen, Frank and Jeremy, Kate is regarded as little else than an outsider. Be it because she’s American, be it because she’s a studied woman, or be it because she’s black, Merle Dandridge’s performance is nuanced enough to interpret it either way.
And that subtle rejection from everyone drives her to isolation. Kate quickly buries herself in the work at the Observatory and, when the Pattern is first discovered, she desperately seeks to understand it.
As that understanding deepens, she understands what it is that it wants, and why it keeps reaching out and trying to spread throughout Yaughton– it’s attempting to communicate.
What the Pattern actually is (an alien being, a collective consciousness, a natural phenomenon…) is left up to interpretation; what is important for the player to understand is that the Pattern is the representation of the game’s central theme– connection.
Whatever the Pattern is, it seeks to reach out to living beings and connect to them, to have them join the light. Within that light, they are able to be with each other, to those they love.
Kate is the way the game has of nailing that theme home; Kate is completely alone. She’s alienated by everyone in the village; she also knows of Stephen’s affair with Lizzie. She truly has no one, not like Wendy had Eddie, like Frank had Mary, like Stephen has Lizzie, even like Father Jeremy has God.
But she has the Pattern. In the game’s final memory, Kate realizes that the Pattern and herself understand each other, relating in their feelings of loneliness and isolation, as that is what drives its desire to reconnect others to their loved ones. Knowing that the Pattern is the connection she’s been desperately needing, one that she never felt throughout her time in Yaughton (and possibly her life), she chooses to come out of isolation in the Observatory and join the Pattern.
It’s not hard to understand, with all of this context, why The Light We Cast is all about connection. Like The End of All Things, the song is abstract, talking about connection and communion and love more than people and relationships. The choral hymn is solemn, peaceful and resolute, as opposed to rapturous (pun not intended) and overwrought.
The choice of using choir throughout the score is actually driven home by The Light We Cast, at least in my opinion. I’ve always been of the interpretation that the choir represents the people in Yaughton, now together in the light, singing to the player as they’re shown the events of the game; after all, it’s the Pattern itself that’s showing all the memories and tape recordings to the player. It guides us through the desolate fields and buildings because it wants us to know what happened.
Then, after the tale is over, everyone it took sings about the peace they found in the light. It’s not a coincidence that Kate is given some of the lyrics as dialogue during the final chapter’s found recordings; the song is also sprinkled throughout the final chapter, leading up to the final revelation. In that way, it’s used so differently from every other song in the score.
But The Light We Cast is still Kate’s song, but only insofar as she is a character designed to convey the major themes of the game’s story, as her character arc happens more subtly over the course of the entire game, as opposed to just the final chapter. It only ever plays in its full form over the credits, after the player is given the full understanding of what story they’re being told.
The Pattern: Psalm 19
There is one more piece of lyrical use in the score, one used sparingly, but very effectively. It’s actually quite complementary to the meaning that The Light We Cast seeks to convey.
During Father Jeremy’s final moments, as he prays for God to help him, he recites a passage from the Bible– Psalm 19, verse 4:
Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun.
Source: The Book of Psalms; Psalm 19, Verse 4; King James version
Right at the same time, Elin Manahan Thomas’ vocals pierce through his prayers with a soaring musical setting of the verse, heard during the first half of All the Earth. It accompanies him as the light takes him, before the choir comes in with Psalm 13.
Keen ears will spot that Psalm 19, set to the exact same melody and sung by Thomas as well, was used during the game’s opening title card, which is scored by the cue starting at 1:29 into Finding the Pattern.
While only superficially related to Father Jeremy due to its biblical origins, I don’t believe the use of Psalm 19 is actually about him at all. Given its most prominent uses in the game, I’ve always found it to speak more about the larger thematic ideas that the game is trying to convey.
The whole of Psalm 19 is about the glory of God’s creations. Verse 4, in particular, talks about how the words of the heavens extend to the ends of the Earth, and how God has made a home for the Sun in them (a tabernacle, in the biblical sense, is a small home of sorts).
Of course, other than Jeremy’s beliefs and how they color his experiences, the game has very little to do with the biblical God. So instead, verse 4 of Psalm 19 takes on a far different interpretation.
The Pattern doesn’t want to hurt people, and in fact it doesn’t actually realize that it’s hurting all the people it takes into the light until Kate explains it to him near the end of the game. Nor does Kate realize that after the pain of killing them, the Pattern allows them to be with those they love in an afterlife of sorts.
And of course, to the player, the nature of the Pattern is kept under wraps for most of the experience. The game even expects the player to view the Pattern as, if not malicious, at least dangerous, only to then dispel that notion as the game progresses.
Once the Pattern reveals to Kate, and in turn the player, that it’s doing something good for them, she’s able to understand what it is.
So to me, Psalm 19’s use speaks of the good intentions of the Pattern. Their line extending through all the earth no longer references God’s kingdom, but the Pattern coming in and enveloping everything in its light; the Sun having a tabernacle in heaven becomes about the Pattern making everyone happy by reuniting them with their loved ones and enjoying themselves in the light.
Its use in Jeremy’s final memory was probably a representation of it trying to tell him that it doesn’t want to hurt him and is only trying to help. Its final use, at the entrance of the Observatory’s final tower (14:10 into the video above), a reassurance that what it’s done, even while bringing about the death of an entire population (and possibly even the world), was done out of love.
This article will continue next week with The Music of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture: The Themes and Sounds of the Apocalypse
EVERYBODY’S GONE TO THE RAPTURE
Music by Jessica Curry
Orchestrated by Jim Fowler
Featuring performances by Metro Voices and London Voices
Featuring solos by Elin Manahan Thomas (vocals), Clio Gould (violin), Nicholas Rodwell (clarinet), Iain Farrington (piano) and Hugh Webb (harp)
Orchestra and Metro Voices conducted by James Morgan
London Voices conducted by Ben Parry
Original lyrics by Dan Pinchbeck
Game Music Hub 