Back in 2013, The Fullbright Company released Gone Home and popularized the "walking simulator" genre in the process. Since Gone Home's runaway success, many other games have attempted to emulate it, though few have reached the same heights. The Suicide of Rachel Foster is the latest walking simulator game chasing Gone Home's popularity, but its mimicry is far less subtle than most, which is just one of the game's downfalls.
The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a tale of two games. The first half of the game is engrossing, interesting, and genuinely creepy. The second half is boring, tedious, and potentially problematic. The Suicide of Rachel Foster comes apart once one realizes that the developers are just copying Gone Home, effectively sucking all of the tension and atmosphere out of the proceedings. There are no stakes, no jump scares, and nothing for players to get invested in or overcome besides some confusing geometry. Anyone that has played Gone Home will see The Suicide of Rachel Foster's "twists" coming from a mile away, and so the story stops being a fun mystery and getting to the end becomes a chore.
Besides liberally borrowing from Gone Home, The Suicide of Rachel Foster throws in some Firewatch and The Shining into the mix for good measure. In the game, players control a character named Nicole, who has been summoned to her family's old hotel in the Montana wilderness so that she can sell it. The hotel is in the mountains, and just like Jack Torrance's family becomes trapped at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining because a nasty winter storm, so too does Nicole.
The Firewatch inspiration comes into play as Nicole becomes acquainted with a FEMA employee named Irving, who talks to her using a bulky 90s cellphone. Irving and Nicole are constantly talking to each other, to the point where it's pointless for them to even stop talking at all. Every few seconds, Nicole will bring the phone back up to her ear to talk to Irving about something, and unlike Firewatch, the two don't really have interesting conversations.
The Suicide of Rachel Foster struggles with a dull script, phoned-in voice acting performances, and characters that are impossible to like. There is hardly any character development that takes place in the game to make players care about anything that's happening to Nicole or her relationship with Irving, and that disconnect makes any and all attempts at emotional impact fall completely flat.
Since walking simulator games are almost all about storytelling, it is absolutely imperative for them to deliver a compelling narrative. Sometimes they do so expertly, like with the aforementioned Gone Home or games like What Remains of Edith Finch. The Suicide of Rachel Foster, meanwhile, delivers one of the most generic ghost stories possible, with predictable plot twists and some exploration of problematic themes that may genuinely make some players feel uncomfortable.
Sometimes horror games can make players feel uneasy by scaring them, but The Suicide of Rachel Foster achieves this by taking a bizarre stance on child grooming. It's revealed early on that the titular Rachel was having an affair with Nicole's father Leonard, who would have been at least twice if not three times Rachel's age at the time of their relationship. There's no problem with video games dealing with mature themes like this, but the way things are handled here wouldn't work in any medium. The game appears to take the stance that there wasn't really anything wrong with the relationship between Rachel and Leonard. No one in the game seems to recognize it as child abuse, outside of a letter that calls Leonard a pedophile (though that's shrugged off as "slander" by Nicole). It's even romanticized to a point. It's weird.
The later half of the game is where all the weird dialogue justifying the relationship between Rachel and Leonard takes place, and that's part of the reason why it's so difficult to get through. Even though The Suicide of Rachel Foster can be completed in three to four hours easily, the second half of the game feels like it never ends. This is also due to some excessive backtracking and talking, with players having to stand around and listen to Nicole discover the twists that the player knew long ago, waiting patiently to interact with the next object they need to click on so that Nicole can drone on again about something else.
The first half of the game, though, is quite different and effective. The hotel gives serious Shining vibes, and before players realize that it's doing the Gone Home trick, they may actually find themselves reluctant to explore its dark halls and creepy rooms, just in case there's something waiting for them. The first half of the game also has some clever gameplay mechanics, like having players work their way to a power generator in the dark with nothing but a Polaroid camera's flash for light.
Nicole will also get her hands on some ghost hunters' leftover audio equipment, which leads to players using it to follow a mysterious sound that's ringing throughout the hotel. Players can continue using these items after their introduction, but there's no real point. These are interesting ideas, but they're wasted as The Suicide of Rachel Foster is uninterested in expanding on them beyond their initial use.
Beyond the few items that Nicole actually does put to use, there are a ton of items that players can examine in the hotel that serve no purpose. These items are all incredibly detailed, and the hotel itself is brought to life with stunningly realistic graphics. Even though the items are useless, there's something fun about looking them over, especially the ones that are firmly rooted in the game's early 90s setting.
It's clear by its impressive visuals and polish that the developers truly put a lot of work into The Suicide of Rachel Foster. The game is mostly let down by plot, which robs the entire experience of any sense of tension, in turn making the game simply not effective as a horror experience. If the developers leaned more into the horror elements and ditched some of the weird plot themes, The Suicide of Rachel Foster could have leveraged its hauntingly realistic visuals to deliver an overall more memorable horror game experience.
The Suicide of Rachel Foster is out now for PC, with a PS4 and Xbox One version also in development. The Best War Games reviewed the game on PC.
The Suicide of Rachel Foster
- Released
- February 19, 2020
