"The Suicide of Rachel Foster"

Okay, this one's just a short review (because it's fuck-o-clock in the morning, I just finished the game, and I really need to dump my initial thoughts somewhere). Heavy spoiler warning if anyone wants to play the game, but hasn't!!

The beginning of "The Suicide of Rachel Foster" was excellent. There was ambiance, a character that didn't want to confront her past being forced to confront it, and a sympathetic foil to her hard-headed approach. The two were going to wait out a deadly storm and help her work through her trauma, right?

Not even a little. This game spent the first 80% of its narrative building up this idea that our protagonist, Nicole, was not alone in the hotel she'd just inherited in the mountains of the middle of nowhere, Montana. But the stranger may have been a girl who'd "committed suicide" a decade prior. It was eerie, tense, and unnerving.

And then two important things happened that sent this game barreling down toward a narrative wasteland:

1. The game attempted to make paranormal occurrences a setpiece that helped tie the plot together; and

2. At almost the exact same time, the game gave a very non-paranormal (if still unnerving) explanation for everything that was happening.

These two elements clashed during the climax, making it impossible to reconcile what the narrative was trying to be, and to make matters worse, the story never addresses the disparate elements, choosing instead to handwave both away at the end of the game without a satisfying or sensible conclusion.

To give more context, Nicole (the protagonist) and her mother fled from the hotel her father owned when it came to light that he was "having an affair" with a 16-year-old in town, Rachel Foster. [The game really really really does not spend enough time reaffirming that this is rape or condemning it, by the way] Ostensibly, the teenager, kills herself, the parents separate, and Nicole only comes back after she was bequeathed the hotel after her parents had both died. When she does come back to appraise it (a thing that a professional would normally do, but whatever), she gets in touch with a local FEMA agent via cell phone. He guides her around the hotel, helping her locate important things. After finding a few oddities laying around and receiving a phone call at the hotel on a supposedly dead phone line, Nicole starts to suspect something odd is going on.

This is when she finds out that some ghost hunters had been in the hotel a year after the "suicide." They had fled the hotel after seeing strange and apparently terrifying sights in their room (we get to see them flee via camera recording). We then pick up their audio equipment for hearing ghosts, which is used exactly once to follow an unexplained ringing sound. This particular plot point is then dropped and never picked back up. We don't know what the ghost hunters saw, why it was scary, what caused the ringing sound, or why, and why those things promptly stopped mattering after seeing/hearing them the first time.

Meanwhile, our FEMA agent-turned friend, Irving, is helping to guide us through the house when we discover an incredibly creepy child's bedroom in a crawl space. Irving warns us to get out and starts to call in an emergency with the presumption that something fucked up is going on in the house (a good instinct!). The gravity of the moment is quickly interrupted by the jarring transition that Irving makes in his dialogue as he reveals himself to be manipulating Nicole into trying to solve the mystery of who really killed Rachel Foster. But he does this in the most "I'm a serial killer and I will absolutely murder you the second you turn your back" way possible.

Despite the intense serial killer vibes, Nicole seems to be inexplicably endeared to Irving as he continues to force her to open the trunk of her mom's old car to reveal a bloody blanket, at which point, Nicole pieces together through circumstantial evidence that her mother actually killed Rachel Foster. This reveal, while unsatisfying for a few reasons, is particularly odd in context, because Irving himself did not know, even though he had stayed in the hotel for years, and the key to the mother's car was sitting out in the middle of Nicole's father's attic, where he spent most of his days after Nicole and her mother had fled.

I want to stop and just hammer home that wild point here for a second: Irving and Nicole's father were partners in trying to figure out what happened to Rachel Foster, but neither of them thought to look in the trunk of the ex-wife's car, despite having the key to it shit-chilling out in the middle of the room where they spent most of their time for years. That seems like a combination of lazy writing and unfathomably stupid characterizations here.

Meanwhile, Irving, as it turns out, is Rachel's little brother, who I guess was just fine with being best buds with the dad, who again, was a pedophile.

All of this was bad enough, but the finale for the game showed Nicole, settling down in her car, finally ready to put all this behind her, but the presumed spirit of Rachel possesses her and turns on the car in an enclosed garage, trying to kill her (despite Nicole doing absolutely nothing wrong in this story). There are only two endings: Nicole suffocates then and there; or Nicole manages to turn off the car and decides to stay in the haunted hotel full of bad memories, murder, and absolutely nothing good in the world for literally no reason.

I'm just... a little shocked that such an interesting premise could fumble over itself so badly during the last act, managing to create pointless loose ends, wrap up the climax of a mystery without allowing the player to figure it out themselves, and then giving two incredibly unsatisfactory endings for what is otherwise an interesting, strong, and intelligent protagonist.

For a game I was genuinely invested in most of the way through, I walked away incredibly disappointed. The acting, set design, ambiance, and pacing were generally excellent up until the end. I feel like giving it a 6/10 is generous because of how badly the last quarter of the game destroys the experience. Maybe we'll settle with a 5/10 on this one.