The Suicide of Rachel Foster does its best to get you in that uncomfortable gameplay horror structure it aspires to achieve, and it succeeds in engaging and pulling you into the experience. The game just falls short in the story and never really brings the actual horror you would expect to the table, which hurts the gameplay. The long journey to start the horror and the payoff by the end doesn’t match up. That’s not to say you won’t get something out of the game, at least some mystery and suspense, but your expectations of what you should get and what you want to get will never quite come to fruition.
The Suicide of Rachel Foster is an interesting title from veterans Daedalic Entertainment. It covers some sensitive topics while leaving assumption to the player, while at the same time trying to shoehorn in horror. You will feel that sense of horror looking down that PT-esque hallway for the first time. Does it succeed in its effort of a total horror package? Let’s talk.
The story follows a young woman’s journey back to her family’s hotel to tie up loose ends, both in business and emotion, and finally bring closure to an unspoken and unfounded sense of brokenness. As soon as she enters the premise to pick up some belongings, she is quickly stuck in the hotel thanks to a winter storm that plows through the area. While she waits for the storm to pass, she begins to wonder about how her family was destroyed thanks to the suicide of Rachel Foster, a young lady who was tied up in some adult matters then killed herself after she couldn’t take anymore…or perceived to have killed herself.
(Hmmmmm)
The gameplay genre of The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a first-person adventure with an overbearing sense of horror weighing down on everything you do, discover, and visit. The design of the game has you going through a dimly lit hotel trying to uncover clues and dig up some nasty facts that no one wants dug up about Foster’s suicide, especially current residents of the hotel (the hotel is empty, so there it is). Playing off Ridley Scott’s Alien concept of jarring sounds and dim lights, the game really does a great job of making you feel like there is something waiting for you in the shadows, and whatever that might be seems to constantly watch you during the entire game. It’s an incredible sense of uneasiness that makes you tighten up with every creak and ‘bang’ in the hotel. The developers nailed the atmosphere of the game and even going as far as to add some Shining like ‘Day’ intertitle count as you progress. In actuality, these are loading areas for the next part of the game — sometimes they take forever.
The actual gameplay is a bit light on execution. While you will certainly meet some scary times, such as getting locked in a freezer or getting a jarring/threatening phone call from a mysterious voice, the payoff seems to mostly underwhelm when compared to the effort. For example, the game took about four ‘Days’ before it got to the beef of the story, where you really dig into the death of Rachel Foster. Prior to that point in the game, you’re mostly just surviving in the hotel, turning the power on, turning the heat on, finding food — it’s like a short survival game before the horror emerges. To help guide you through the game, there is a suspicious field agent named Irving, who calls you during certain moments of the game (and you can sometimes answer with branching narrative responses).
Anyway, it’s a weird, long transition to get to the point where you get to the horror. Once you get there, the game really starts pouring it on thick. You know by looking at everything in the game that some bad shit went down. There is even a moment where you see bad shit going down in a VHS flashback, but then the game pulls back a bit and never gets the story ‘there’. It’s as if the writers of the game didn’t quite understand how horror works, as the game never truly gets over the hump into the scary. Now, that’s not to say that the end won’t bring you some very human and horrifying details, but as a traditional horror survival game, The Suicide of Rachel Foster really has a hard time getting to where it wants to go. Players will certainly feel that emptiness by the journey’s end, where it took too long to develop, and the payoff really didn’t equal the trip. If you’re looking for an uncomfortable game that gives you some bad vibes, then this is it, but if you’re looking for horror it’s going to be a tough sell.
I’m shy in detail because I’d rather you play it yourself. I’m really not into spoiling things (#BruceWillisIsaGhost).
As for the actual gameplay and how it functions, the controls aren’t anything particularly special. You pick up items, you examine items, you sometimes pocket items. Some of the pocketed items turn out to be useful, such as a sound device that can pick up whispers in the hotel and tell you where ‘activity’ might be happening. Other items are merely there to serve a singular purpose, so they’re whipped out and used at singular times. If you know survival horror, then you know this is typical.
The controls work like what you would expect from a first-person survival horror, where you’re mostly searching for hots spots and interactive areas to push buttons so that the next scene can activate. Much like items you pick up, nothing in the control scheme is out of the ordinary, though I do want to knock the map and navigation portion of the game, as it can be tough to read and get figure out your locations at times. Maybe that was by design in order to cast a disorienting feel about the game, or maybe it was an afterthought that could be improved. It’s as tough to tell as reading the map in the game.
Anyway, the overall gameplay design is simply hampered by the story. Sure, it has some material in it that harkens to a more realistic sense of horror, but the story just never achieves the greatness it sets out to find. Everything else about the survival horror part of the game is very much in check, but it was all dependent on the horror aspect of the story.
On the presentation side, loved the acting and loved how the game looked. It certainly has ten shades of creepy construction about it and uses lighting to magnify the uncomfortableness of the situation your main character lies in. It doesn’t fall short of providing a layer of atmosphere to the experience, so you won’t be disappointed in the presentation. From music to style to voice over, there is a lot to love about The Suicide of Rachel Foster’s presentation.
Overall, The Suicide of Rachel Foster does its best to get you in that uncomfortable gameplay horror structure it aspires to achieve, and it succeeds in engaging and pulling you into the experience. The game just falls short in the story and never really brings the actual horror you would expect to the table, which hurts the gameplay. The long journey to start the horror and the payoff by the end doesn’t match up. That’s not to say you won’t get something out of the game, at least some mystery and suspense, but your expectations of what you should get and what you want to get will never quite come to fruition.
