The Suicide of Rachel Foster

Pretty much firewatch clone with predictable plot. You explore hotel being stuck in a snowstorm and talking with character from mobile phone/walkie talkie. About midway into game I was able to predict the ending and I was not surprised by it. Has some Shining vibes too. I was expecting horror game but there are no monsters outside of player's head.

As some of the other reviews point out, the main problem in this game is the story. The story itself is fine, nothing groundbreaking or surprising, but the handling and execution of it feels very bland and not well thought out. The climax of the game is particularly disappointing and doesn't make a lot of sense, even using the logic of the story itself. The story and dialogue definitely needed to go through another draft or two. A big problem for many players of this game was also how the relationship between an adult man and a teenager is framed as an 'affair' and not grooming in the game. The framing of this relationship would not necessarily have been a problem had the story been revised and worked on more, but it definitely doesn't put the makers of this game in the best of light by today's standards. Even in the context of the story, it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. On the plus side of the gameplay, I appreciated the setting of the hotel and the details of the artwork, as well as the sound design. I wish it was utilised better however. It makes no sense that when you zoom in on certain objects relatively close to you, that they somehow get more blurry. You receive 3 items during your gameplay which are used once (if even that), which seems pointless. As another reviewer pointed out, the pacing is strange when it comes to exploration of the hotel - I wanted to explore the hotel but often found out that I was in certain areas "too early" in the story. The dialogue choices are irellevant and make no difference to the game whatsoever. While the game makes a point of the story being hidden in the details, I found that a lot of the story was told through exposition and not through discovery, which was quite disappointing - especially since I liked the hotel, and the story could have been discovered slowly through finding different objects and such. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game.

The scenery is very well done and it's fun to explore the hotel at first, but the game lacks. A lot. The story is so obvious that you can foresee the biggest "twist" that's gonna happen in the storyline after a couple of minutes already. The "riddles" are very easy to solve and 90% of the game is spent waiting until one of the long and slow phone calls finally finishes so you can carry on already. These calls are so annoying. Every piece of information and every clue you find has to be commented by a drawn out phone call that almost always does nothing but explain stuff that you already had figured out yourself to begin with. Either that, or it's irrelevant and boring chatter. In the end this doesn't even make sense anymore. I don't want to spoiler too much, but basically you're getting called by someone who doesn't has access to his broadcasting equipment anymore. It looks like an "open" game, but it isn't. You have to follow the path exactly. You can't take alternative routes, doors are locked and unlocked to keep you on track all the time. Sometimes there would be faster paths (for example when getting the screwdriver, why can't I go through the staff area, why do I have to go "backwards" through the garage?), but the game just locks a door that previously had been open. This wouldn't be that bad, if only Nicole wouldn't walk as slow as a slug, even when running. It says in the description that it combines "mystery and horror". Don't be fooled, there's no "horror" in this game at all. I can recommend this if you want to play it for the exploration part alone and don't care about anything else, or if you have never ever in your life read or watched a mystery thriller before and might actually get surprised by the bog-standard storyline.

The story is slow, poorly handled, and boring. The character walks slowly. Conversations are drawn out, and you will frequently find yourself standing around waiting for them to end so you can do the thing the conversation is telling you to do. At one point there was a section where you have no guidance and I wasted a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out what the game wanted from me. Turns out I had even been to the right place, I just hadn't interacted with the one object I needed to. The graphics are probably the high point, but they are generic Unreal Engine photorealism. There are no real graphics options to speak of, and the game has nauseating head bobbing. I have no idea what motivated me to buy this, but I wish I hadn't.

Deep story, it really makes you wanna take care of everything