The suicide of rachel foster horror9/19/2023 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. Rachel's story is not melancholic or poetic as the game represents it, it's just irresponsible.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. I barely know anything about this character apart from the fact that she was groomed starting when she was young, got pregnant by a man three times her age, and then took her own life. No letters, no flashbacks, no pages from a diary, nothing that attempts at giving her any voice. For a character whose name is in the title of the game, I know very little about her. The most damaging aspect of how the game frames this relationship is that Rachel has no voice throughout the entire game. It made me cringe, especially as the game's marketing focuses on Rachel's retainer, an object that emphasises how young she is. There's a line where Rachel is described as 'mature for her age' as if it's some sort of excuse to her father's relationship with the teenager. An attic with fairy lights hangs above a bed where sketches of the teenager posing naked lie scattered on top. The relationship is even more worrying because it's seen as romantic. It's revealed that Rachel was nine weeks pregnant when she died and clues indicate that she was groomed by Nicole's father from a young age. As the second half of the game begins to delve into the details about Nicole's father and Rachel's relationship, it becomes clear that One-O-One Games is treading into a territory that it is not equipped to handle. However, rummaging through Nicole's belongings and unearthing the history of the hotel is where Rachel Foster gets problematic. I felt like it was heading more in the direction of a ghost story than a mystery, which I was somewhat looking forward to. Another section has you watch the old battered VHS recordings of a ghost-hunting group that captures the crew's terrified reactions to something off-screen. In one chapter the power completely goes out and you have to navigate the pitch blackness using only the flash of a polaroid to guide you. Rummaging through Nicole's belongings and unearthing the history of the hotel is where Rachel Foster gets problematic It serves as a cosy safe haven within the confines of the hotel. Nicole's room has been kept exactly the same as when she left it. You go from being scared about what around the corner of a narrow corridor, to massive ballrooms, dining halls, kitchens, and lounge areas where anything could be lurking. The hotel uses both its corridors and open spaces to build tension.
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