6/20/2023 0 Comments Turn up the cheat rachel foster![]() Rachel is not framed as a probable abuse victim, a child who became pregnant by her father's best friend (!), but as a tragic young woman - a star crossed lover, almost. Leonard's chief sin is that he cheated on his wife, and not that he started shagging a 16 year old who he was teaching, for God's sake. The most glaring problem is how The Suicide Of Rachel Foster fails to meaningfully engage with its central themes. Rather than teasing it out, getting a sense of the shape of it, and gradually uncovering more facts, Nicole is spooked out for a few hours, before the actual reveal is dropped all at once in a sticky rush, like so much gunge poured on hapless parents by Dave Benson Phillips. But the pacing of the central mystery is all wrong. The voice actors do a good job of making Nicole and Irving interesting, the former a kind of a caricature of a strong independent bitch who needs no help from nobody (who can blame her?), and the latter a kind of extremely nice nervous dork, the sort of person I'd describe as a wetty. Similarly, you find tools that have a specific purpose (a Polaroid camera that you use when the lights go out, or a parabolic mic to track spooky noises) but each is only used once, in one set piece, and so they end up feeling spare. There are isolated pockets in the building where you busy yourself most often - the apartment, the offices, the basement - but in between are corridors of empty rooms that you can't enter, which might as well be blank space. You, as a player, are one step removed from the uncanniness when creepy things start to happen. The Timberline doesn't, because you don't feel at home in a hotel by definition, even if Nicole does. Gone Home works because you know how to navigate a family home. ![]() ![]() Where Gone Home lead you naturally through the empty house as you discovered new things, The Suicide Of Rachel Foster leads you by the nose, partly because, though the Timberline is a nice vision of gently spoiling grandeur - the Miss Havisham's wedding cake of hotels, but with a bit of The Shining flavour - it's a lot bigger than a house. And there isn't a voiceover telling us that - it's just something to look at and understand. Leonard's thinking had, we can infer, changed over the last decade. But around his bed you find tomes about ghosts, and how to talk to the dead. The apartment where Nicole's dad lived out his mouldering last days in a likewise mouldering hotel, for example, is full of books about physics, the stars, and space. The Suicide Of Rachel Foster is actually really good at that, too. I'll forgive a lot for a mystery where I noodle around an empty building full of sweet, sweet environmental storytelling. Irving is unreasonably invested in Nicole's plight, for reasons you eventually discover. She's not entirely isolated, however, as she has an early mobile phone that lets her speak to Irving, a FEMA agent stationed nearby. Nicole, back at the Timberline to inventorise and sell it after the deaths of both her parents, ends up investigating this piscine odour - this whiff of trout - while she's trapped there for a few days during a snowstorm. So far, so titular - and obviously, there turns out to have been something fishy about Rachel's death. ![]() ![]() It seems she probably died on the same day that Claire and Nicole left. Shortly thereafter Rachel went missing, and was found a few days later at the bottom of a cliff, with a note indicating she had taken her own life. Ten years before the events of the game, Nicole and her mother left suddenly, and never returned, after it was discovered that Leonard was having an affair with the 16-year-old Rachel. They ran the hotel and lived there with the teenaged Nicole, while Leonard was tutoring local girl Rachel Foster, and by all accounts it was a pretty successful set up. You play as Nicole, a grown woman now returning to the Timberline, an old mountain hotel that belonged to her parents, Claire and Leonard. Then, in the last half hour or so, it goes properly off the rails and the content warning is proven necessary. It's a decent enough first person explorey mystery along the lines of Firewatch or Gone Home, but, you know, not as good as either of those. I would have said that about The Suicide Of Rachel Foster too, at least based on the bulk of the game. There are sensible ways to deliver content warnings, and a game signposting that it is extremely serious business in massive white letters on a black background usually means that, in reality, the contents of it are pretty milquetoast. Normally these feel a bit like grandstanding. If you couldn't tell from the title, The Suicide Of Rachel Foster makes sure you know it's about proper issues with one of them big content warning screens up front. ![]()
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