The Suicide Of Rachel Foster
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Let’s start with that title. Pretty much everything you need to know about The Suicide Of Rachel Foster, good and bad, is right there in those five words. Take the peculiarly specific naming convention it adheres to: one that places it alongside The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter and What Remains Of Edith Finch. Firstperson adventure games, their stories led by mystery, set in the northern states of the US, where you do a lot of walking around… The game very much does what it says on the tin.
More importantly, though, there’s the matter of the S-word. There is certainly room for thoughtful handling of the topic within videogames, but advertising the suicide aspect up front has a certain tabloid luridness that makes us wary. That is disarmed by an opening splash screen that warns of “sensitive subjects” ahead, advising you approach with care. It’s a level-headed, if vague, content warning – one which makes it all the more baffling when the ensuing story makes decisions we can only describe as wildly irresponsible.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The Suicide Of Rachel Foster casts you as Nicole, the freshly orphaned inheritor of a hotel in the mountains of Montana. It’s the home she grew up in but hasn’t set foot in for a decade, since her father was revealed to be having an affair with a teenage girl who subsequently killed herself. She returns to the hotel, just long enough to sell it, and gets trapped in by a blizzard. It’s a solid enough premise for a thriller, one that mashes together pieces from a dozen stories you’ve seen before.
The game isn’t shy about its influences. In case you missed where it got the ‘snowbound in an abandoned hotel’ idea from, an early cutscene mimics The Shining’s helicopter shot tracking a car as it winds along mountain roads. The rest of Rachel Foster’s opening is borrowed from other sources: a letter that, like the text-adventure opening of Firewatch, gives you just a little say over how past events played out, intercut with a funeral sequence that, similar to some of Edith Finch’s set-pieces, pulls you out of the firstperson perspective and into a top-down view so all you see of your character is the canopy of their black umbrella. Not a moment of any of that feels new, but it rearranges familiar ideas in an interesting way, a demonstration that the game understands the sources it’s borrowing from. This isn’t always the case.
Nicole is alone in the house, but early in the game she finds a portable phone with a direct line to a FEMA agent, Irving. Think Henry and Delilah’s walkie-talkie conversations in Firewatch, down to the same tone of blossoming friendship. This game is structured the same way, too: you make day-by-day trips out from home base, punctuated by phone chatter. But where Firewatch had woods for you to get lost in, Rachel Foster is set in a single closed-off building, much like Gone Home or Edith Finch.
The environments are nicely rendered, and occasionally show a good eye for detail – Nicole’s teenage bedroom is trapped in the amber of the 1980s, the last time she slept in it, with posters and stickers and hand-labelled tapes for you to study – but those details are clustered in a few rooms. The spaces in between are largely featureless, just rows of unlockable doors with nothing behind them. This means getting around is rarely interesting, and the game drags you along the same stretches of hotel corridor over and over.
It ends up feeling like parts of other games, borrowed and mashed up without any consideration of how they fit together, what made them work. Take those conversations, which are the meat of the game – they’re not scoped to fit the space you’re moving through, so often you’ll arrive at your destination and have to look around awkwardly as another minute or two of dialogue plays out. But these are all minor niggles. Ultimately, the game is just a delivery mechanism for the story – and, while there are occasional moments of promise, this is where Rachel Foster makes its worst missteps.
It takes a little while to become apparent what kind of story you’re in. It could be a drama about going back home and facing past trauma, or a horror story about being trapped in an empty house where you’re not sure you are alone. It gradually reveals itself as a mystery, but again it’s unclear which one you’re trying to solve: whether Rachel actually committed suicide? Whether she’s really dead? Whether she’s a ghost? Whether your father was having an affair with a 16-year old child?
The story flits between these questions, but by the end it turns out that only one of them really matters. It feels like the game is trying to wrongfoot you, pile on the red herrings, but in practice this means you never settle long enough to ponder an answer. So when the shocking conclusion arrives – make that plural, actually, the final half-hour is a boss rush of revelations and plot twists – there are no expectations to undercut.
Jaws might well have dropped during that finale, but not for the intended reasons. For all the story’s willingness to flip tables and pull rugs, Rachel Foster
never once interrogates the relationship at the centre of its mystery, between a grown man and a 16-year-old child. There’s no twist on that, and the conclusion assumes some kind of redemption for the man. It shows a remarkably casual attitude towards – to put it politely – a problematic sexual power dynamic. Likewise the game’s closing moments, which toy with suicidal imagery in a way that’s both distressing and completely unjustified. These are the very worst examples, but they’re symptomatic of a larger problem: the sense that The Suicide Of Rachel Foster is messing around with borrowed ideas it never quite understands.
Feels like parts of other games, borrowed and mashed up without any consideration of how they fit together