The Suicide of Rachel Foster

... except walking, very slowly. The atmosphere is empty-hotel-good. It gets a bit scary at times, but nothing too bad. The story is okay, but nothing great. In the end it does'nt even make too much sense, and it's absolutely linear and gets shoved in your face without you participating much. There is almost no feeling of exploration. Which is a killer for this type of game. It goes like this: You listen to them talking on the phone, then you head to that one place which drives the story fowards but get lost in the corridors on the way, find other, probably story-relevant things that you cannot yet interact with, find a lot of things you can pick up and look at, which you do, because the game told you to keep close watch, but you soon find out that absolutely nothing is to be found out about all these packs of cigarettes lying around ... and after arriving at the right spot, you listen again. Very disappointing.

On est bloqué en QWERTY... On est en 2020, MERDE.

Let's get rid of the elephant in the room first: Yes, this game has grooming and can be disturbing to some people, judging the negative reviews here. Is it a bad game? No, not really. I'd say it's average. The Suicide of Rachel Foster tries too hard to be like Firewatch, which is a masterful walking sim. The graphics are nice but nothing special. The soundtrack and voice acting is okay, but the real star is the location. Our main character Nicole needs to hide in her deceased parents old hotel during a snowstorm, which brings up memories of The Overlook Hotel from The Shining. It even has similar carpet and furniture. Here she discovers family secrets she's unprepared for. Her only contact during her stay is some FEMA agent she talks to on satellite phone, but can she trust him? Sounds familiar? The story never trancends that of a regular Midsomer Murders episode, with some grooming thrown in there. People shouting 'pedophilia' have probably never heard of 'ephebophilia', which is exactly what the theme in Rachel Foster is. Yeah, it's still wrong, but judge the game on it's gameplay instead of its disturbing theme, will you? I wonder if people like this also protest movies with similar dark themes. A sad bunch of snowflakes and prudes if you ask me, not ready for the real world. Anyway, play Firewatch instead, or if you want horror Amnesia: The Dark Descent. If you really want to see what all the fuzz is about, wait until this is for sale for a couple of bucks.

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.