There’s supposed to be a spooky ghost in the hotel you find yourself and much of your time is exploring the hotel unrelated to the main topic.īut just as the player is about to uncover the ghost, The Suicide of Rachel Foster seems to drop the thread and move back to the main story leaving the player with an unsatisfying conclusion. So rather than exploring the serious topic at the core of its story, The Suicide of Rachel Foster instead decides to spend most of its runtime with horror tropes that don’t connect to the main story in a meaningful way. The problem is instead of tackling and examining the issue at the core of the game, The Suicide of Rachel Foster seems to leave this relationship unexplored and heavily ambiguous, only allowing an unreliable narrator to call it love, but unable to even say that they had anything other than an infatuation. In this case, the main character’s father seems to be infatuated with a sixteen-year-old. In this case, the wheel of tragedies seems to have landed on inappropriate relationships between adults and children. While the game is a typical “Walking Simulator” or exploration game it wants to tackle a large and sensitive issue like many of its contemporaries. It’s a game that feels like it loses its focus multiple times and yet struggles to deal with the very real and serious issues at its core. Smith reviews video games for Catholic News Service.The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a problematic game for several reasons. Not rated by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. The Catholic News Service classification is O - morally offensive. The game contains skewed values, some violence with gore and mature references. Playable on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows. That’s an eventuality gamers can avoid being involved with by looking elsewhere for their entertainment. Suicide is depicted here as an escape or even a punishment, rather than a desperate act that’s often the result of mental illness or extreme duress.ĭepending on the decisions Nicole makes, up to two other characters besides Rachel can die in this manner. The topic of suicide, moreover, is handled with a complete lack of compassion, both toward the characters and toward players who might have real-world experience of such a tragedy. In a letter to Nicole, her mother correctly labels Leonard - who began grooming Rachel for his purposes when she was 15 - a “pedophile.” But Nicole herself shrugs this off as “slander.” This can be seen in its attempt to portray the relationship between Rachel and Leonard as pure and romantic rather than illegal, abusive and evil. But the later stages fail to follow through on this promising start, and the tension slackens.Ī far more glaring failure, though, concerns the game’s underlying ethics. Thus, after the power goes out, Nicole’s only source of light is the flashbulb of an old Polaroid camera. The first half of the gameplay possesses some interesting mechanics that heighten suspense. Unlike the successful predecessors on which it draws, however, the new game falls short when it comes to its storyline - which is the most important element of any interactive title. Its sources include Stanley Kubrick 1980 film “The Shining,” Campo Santo’s award-winning title “Firewatch” and Fullbright’s critically acclaimed game “Gone Home.” (Kubrick, for instance, used the real-life Timberline Lodge in Oregon for exterior shots of the fictional Overlook Hotel in “The Shining.”) Her prolonged solitude ultimately forces her to confront the truth of her past.įrom the beginning, it is easy to trace the game’s influences. Now, an intense winter storm traps Nicole in the Timberline for days with only the disembodied voice of a FEMA agent for company. She and her mother, we learn, fled the place a decade earlier after Nicole’s father, Leonard (voice of Mark Hanna), impregnated her 16-year-old friend Rachel - who subsequently killed herself. The Entertainment Software Rating Board rating is M - Mature. This is a scene in the video game “The Suicide of Rachel Foster.” The Catholic News Service classification is O - morally offensive. Following the death of her father, Nicole returns to her family’s remote hotel, the Timberline, to get it ready for sale. The plot, set in 1993, revolves around a young woman named Nicole (voice of Kosha Engler). NEW YORK (CNS) - The walking simulator horror game “The Suicide of Rachel Foster” (Daedelic Games) boasts hauntingly realistic visuals and simple mechanics.īut these assets are more than offset by a poorly devised story and, more importantly, a moral outlook so abysmally flawed that this title cannot be recommended for any audience.
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