THE SUICIDE OF RACHEL FOSTER Review for Steam

The Suicide of Rachel Foster is an indie thriller and mystery game developed by One-O-One Games and published by Daedalic Entertainment, released on Steam February 19^th, 2020. The game follows the story of a young woman named Nicole who has recently lost her mother and returns after years to her estranged family’s hotel, which she has now inherited. Nicole’s relationship with her father was torn apart when he had an affair with a young girl named Rachel, who later committed suicide. Feeling rather disconnected from the legacy of her family, Nicole is planning to have a quick look at the hotel and sell it. However, a powerful snow storm forces Nicole to stay in the creepy, worn-down hotel, and confront haunting memories about her family that she had buried in the back of her mind since childhood.

Pretty much the entirety of the story takes place in the decaying hotel of Nicole’s family in Helen, Montana during a winter storm in the early 1990s. The design of the hotel is wonderful, with realistic graphics and animation coupled with multiple small details that players can play around with if they choose. The meticulous detail paid to the design and animation made the hotel immersive and useful as a tool for understanding Nicole’s family outside of the dialogue descriptions given by Nicole herself. The vastness of the hotel made the emptiness all the more unsettling whenever there were small unidentifiable sounds going on in the background throughout my play through, and several areas played up the creepiness by having less lighting. The time frame of the story also played a part in making the game into more of a thriller. Lack of adequate technology keeps the player’s contact with the world outside of the hotel limited and allows investigation to focus on objects like tapes, newspapers, and radios, which are inexplicably creepier and more fitting in thriller and mystery games. Game play is mostly just walking around and exploring the hotel, picking up and observing things along the way. There are options for dialogue, but they do not seem to matter much. The player is given one major decision at the end of the game.

As stated, other than the objects of the hotel most of the insight into our characters is given by Nicole herself through somewhat natural dialogue (with commendable voice acting from all characters). The pacing of the story in the game is well-done for the first half, and we gradually come to understand a considerable amount about the personalities of and relationships between Nicole’s family members and the Fosters, Rachel’s family. While I did not find Nicole likable as a main character, I, more importantly, found her more and more understandable as the flawed character she was as she continued to open up about her childhood. The story also has good pacing for the relationship-building between Nicole and Irving for a rather short game. The relationship does not feel out of place and softens the otherwise cold and silent atmosphere of the game while also setting up to reintroduce that silent eeriness later, at times when Irving is not reachable. Exploration was almost seamlessly combined with small episodes of memorization for most of the game, and the sound effects used for some later scenes of memorization impressively matched the tone of the game.

Unfortunately, I found the focus of the game, the story, disappointing. While the story in isolation may have been okay and definitely had potential, the execution of the story-telling in the game is not good. Aspects of the story that were supposed to be the most exhilarating parts of the “mystery” felt rushed or predictable. From the beginning of the story, we are already told a considerable amount about the shocking situation that broke Nicole’s family apart: Nicole’s father, Leonard, had an affair with a girl that later killed herself, likely as a result. While there is a major mystery aspect to Rachel’s story that is missing, players will not spend most of the game investigating that. In fact, players spend most of the game focusing on a question about Rachel that we never actually get an answer to. SPOILER ALERT (skip to next paragraph to ignore): The game spends a considerable amount of time toying with the idea of Rachel as a ghost, but in the end it doesn’t matter because we never actually encounter Rachel directly nor do we get clarification that she exists as a ghost in any other way, yet there are several occurrences in the story that cannot be explained away by anything other than supernatural interference and constant references to Rachel being seen around the hotel. It makes it even more disappointing if there is a ghost Rachel and we just never get to see her and the main character interact.

The story falls short of creating a natural progression in which the main character changes the way she does in the end and simply goes with the “snapped” approach. While character-building had been fairly well done for about half of the game, it feels like the ending options for the main character’s story are just cliché ways to try and shock the player instead of being realistic reactions to her situation.

7/10

Check Out The Suicide of Rachel Foster Steam Trailer:

The Suicide of Rachel Foster is available for PC for $17.99 via Steam.