The Suicide of Rachel Foster

Spoilers abound, by the way. Also trigger warnings for physical abuse, sexual abuse, and suicide. Pros: Competently made. Environments look gorgeous, music’s pretty good, voice acting ain’t bad. Cons: EVERYTHING ELSE. Game sells itself on being spooky, yet there is no actual ghost story. It’s a story about abuse that fumbles the ball SO BADLY that it’s insulting and nearly dangerous. It romanticizes the grooming and sexual abuse of a teenager, painting her abuser as a good, even noble man who even the abused brother liked and had no problems with. It paints the abuser’s wife as a jealous woman who killed the abused and framed it as a suicide. That’s not even going into how it paints suicide as a goddamn positive where you can finally be with your loved ones again. I have this via PSN. It’s the ONLY game I’ve ever played that made me wish I could remove it from my library and delete every trophy I earned. Hell, I could’ve gotten a Platinum on this but that would’ve meant replaying it and I refuse to give this insulting, harmful, disgusting, inept game another second of my time and promptly deleted it from my hard drive. Fuck this game. One Star is far more than it deserves.

I own this game on Steam and have played it twice. First time I hated it, second time I liked it a lot more. It's graphically odd in the way that the medium settings look atrocious and it's only playable on Ultra. It has optimization issues and just didn't work on my old laptop with 2 GB Vram (which could run Far Cry 5 no problems). The setting is very well made, the house is fun to explore and the two characters locked in over the radio your only company. It is a walking sim done right + Isolation + Easy puzzles + Mystery + Interesting location + well done voice acting It's derivative of Firewatch's mechanics, but who cares? Walking sims are few and far in between and I for one did enjoy this game a lot, but only the second time I played it and when I played it on better hardware.

Looks great. Sounds great. Plays decently. Writing and story start off good ernough... SPOLERS... and effing drive off a cliff. Like, they mishandle ALL the heavy themes. Suicide, pedophilia, murder, you name it. Also holy hell CW suicide, not that it should be a surprise.

I really liked the flow of this game. Being familiar with the other giants in the genre I found it to be very particular, in a good way. I love to take my time to explore environments, and the Timberline allowed me to do this right from the start! Every once in a while Irving calls to guide you a bit, but then its up to you to figure out exactly where to go and/or how to get there. Sometimes the game doesnt give you much indication of what needs to be done, which I especially liked because it made the experience more realistic. I would get lost, contemplate, explore, and eventually find the objective, as if I was really in Nicole's situation.

All I could think of while playing this game was, "Ya know, this feels a lot like 'Firewatch.'" The parallels are quite obvious: a playable character stuck in the middle of nowhere; the only contact with the outside world available via a telephone/walkie-talkie; dealing with themes including depression and death; and a constant feeling of impending doom. On top of that, the ending of "Rachel Foster" basically throws the rest of the story into a blender, leaving you thinking to yourself, "What just happened here?" It's almost like the developers were trying TOO hard to incorporate several sensitive topics into one game. And while this works in some games (such as "Life is Strange," for example), it just doesn't here, especially once you reach the end of the story. I really wanted to like this game, but ultimately it didn't leave that great an impression on me.