The Suicide of Rachel Foster: A Tasteless Tragedy

Narrative focused adventure games with minimal gameplay or "Walking Simulators" as the gaming community has dubbed them, has carved out it's own little niche among fans by now. Titles that break out into the mainstream like Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch are few and far in between but we have been getting a steady supply of walking sims every year, The Suicide of Rachel Foster is the latest among them.

This review contains vague spoilers and I will talk about how the game handles the sensitive topics.

Premise and Gameplay:

Taking inspiration from both The Shining and Firewatch, The Suicide of Rachel Foster presents us with a mystery/horror-tragedy that is intriguing for most of it's duration. It puts you in the shoes of Nicole who reluctantly returns to her family owned hotel to face the demons of her family's past. 10 years back before she and her mother had moved out, her father had been entangled in a scandal of being romantically involved with a teen named Rachel and getting her pregnant who later committed suicide. Understandably this tore her family apart and Nicole didn't want to have anything to do with her past. But after her dad died and left the hotel to her, she had to return for a legally required inspection.

Set in the Timberline Hotel, the games sees you exploring the intricately designed rooms and hallways to look for clues regarding the mystery that looms over you. Aiding you in your journey is an mysterious FEMA agent named Irving that doesn't show up in person but rather keeps you company through a cellphone. While initially it may seem like you have complete exploration freedom, narratively doing anything other than what the game wants you to do is pointless. Not that it matters since the constant creepy atmosphere does at effective job of making you want to return to the safety of your room as soon as possible. The games uses binaural audio to achieve it's audio immersion which the game wouldn't be the same without.

Story and Experience: 

If you have played a Walking Simulator before, you'd know that how the player is made to experience the story is just as important as the story if not more. This is doubly true for The Suicide of Rachel Foster, where the horror atmosphere is ever present without using most horror tropes. A context for my tastes in horror games, getting chased by monsters or dying and respawning in a horror game kills all the atmosphere buildup for me. But a slow ever present dread of something going wrong is something that gets to me and this game excels in that. 

The games markets "binaural audio" as a key defining feature. What this technical jargon means is that the audio would be more locational than standard stereo sound thus helping you identify where each sound effect is coming from. You constantly hear floors creaking, wall scratches and other audio cues that serves to unnerve the player even when there's no music. This atmosphere of dread is broken up by occasional back and forth between Nicole and Irving through the cell phone. Here I should mention that the voice acting sells the personality of the characters quite well even if doesn't reach the stellar quality of Firewatch. My 1 criticism would be the dialogues felt a bit too frequent leaving us little room for exploration and soaking in the atmosphere by our lonesome. But this doesn't take away from the experience too much.

If audio is one pillar of the horror genre, then lighting is the second main pillar. It makes me happy to say that this games have fantastic location design and lighting to accompany. It manipulates what the player is supposed to feel by weaving the story through various times of the day to increase or decrease the tense atmosphere. You rooms is always well lit to signify a safe space while rest of the areas always ooze a haunting vibe. The halls and rooms of this hotels intentionally serve as a callback to horror classic The Shining.

Now, we come to the story, the glue that holds everything together in this game, yet I couldn't help but feel this is where comparatively less effort went in. Not to mention how poorly sensitive topics are handled.
The hotel is chalk full of tiny details, a significant amount of which in key locations add to the world building even before we get to the meat of the story. One neat detail I found at the very beginning of the game that was only vaguely hinted at by the game is that the player character's father had tried to call upon the spirit of the dead girl through a mix of occult and astronomy. Unfortunately game doesn't acknowledge this discovery with some extra dialogue and instead saves it for a scripted story surprise.
One might be taken aback by how fast the the story progresses given the meditative nature of the genre but the charming dialogue between our protagonists helps to keep your interest for the most part. The game hints at some light romantic tension between our characters which comes off as forced at first but the late story twist makes the awkwardness of it feel justified.

The two main topics that the game introduces are how Nicole's father had a relationship with a teen and which in turn destroyed their family. The later is not hard to imagine and the story doesn't shy away from expressing how it left our protagonist scarred. Her mother's last request was to sever the cycle of hatred that went on in the hotel and sell it.
The death of the teen had been final trigger in the death of her family. Thus we are tasked with finding out the reason for the suicide through the perspective of Nicole. After a linear set of discoveries we find that Nicole might indeed still be around, whether alive or as ghost. Tensions rise finally culminating in Irving confessing to setting everything up and purposefully prodding her to find the truth.
While the father's guilt had been firmly established in the beginning, we are lead through a narrative that slowly but surely tries to diminish that guilt. We get to know that Rachel had a mental illness and a strict religious upbringing denied her help that she should have gotten. Instead Nicole's father starts treating her with some success. This benevolent action is then used to justify their inappropriate relationship. We even find erotic art of underage Rachel in the father's study which gross to say the least. We finally discover that Nicole's mother had been jealous of Rachel for a long time and had ultimately killed her, a traumatic memory that she had forgot. This further pushes the father into a good light in this story.

It can be argued that a character's perspective in a story is not something the author may condone, but it's undeniable that it leaves a sour taste in our mouth. In the end what could have been a great tragedy to pull at your heart strings instead leaves you perplexed at to what message the game wants to send.