The Suicide of Rachel Foster

Long before Resident Evil convinced an entire generation that mansions are scary, Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King made the convincing argument that there's nothing more terrifying than being snowed in at a haunted hotel. Perhaps somebody should have told that to Nicole Wilson, the star of the new horror game The Suicide of Rachel Foster. She's about to spend a tension-filled week investigating an old abandoned hotel, and poor Nicky has no idea what's in store for her. Somebody really should have forced her to watch The Shining.

It's the early 1990s and Helena, Montana, is about to have their biggest snowstorm in decades. That's certainly inconvenient for Nicole, who is braving the bad weather in order to visit the now-shuttered hotel that she grew up in as a kid. This is not what you would call a happy homecoming, though, because the woman is still grieving over the recent loss of her mother and only going back to meet with a lawyer about selling the hotel. As far as she's concerned, this is going to be quick and simple, ending with her back on the road before the sun goes down.

As I'm sure you've figured out by now, things do not go as planned. First the lawyer doesn't show up and then Nicole gets snowed in by the blizzard. This forces her to not only eat a lot of canned beans, but also confront the long-buried trauma associated with this cursed hotel. She, along with a young FEMA agent named Irving, begin to investigate the shocking events surrounding the suicide of Rachel Foster back in the 1980s. But what starts out as a simple way to pass the time quickly turns into something far more terrifying.

This is what I would call a slow-burn horror game. The Suicide of Rachel Foster deliberately takes its time setting everything up, lulling you into a false sense of security as you poke around the hotel looking for clues. A lot of the adventure involves you picking up items and solving incredibly simple puzzles, all while Nicole reminisces about her childhood. In fact, these conversations with Irving make up a bulk of the story, giving you a real sense of who these characters are. There are times when she'll get off the phone and then immediately call him back. And this isn't just a few times, but constantly. Nicole is not good on her own.

A lot of the reason why this game is so effective is because hotels are inherently fun to explore, even more so when they're abandoned and in ill-repair. This one is filled with secret rooms and passages, but even the garage and back offices are fun to discover. I like how the attention to detail helps to sell the lived-in feel, all of which helps make the second half of the game that much more disturbing. It's a small hotel and you'll see a lot of the same rooms and hallways many times, but everything from the dining room to the museum to the video game arcade has a personality that is different from most horror games.

The deliberately-paced start also takes you off guard, setting up a scenario that could go a number of different ways. I had my suspicions based on the clues and evidence, but I was never sure where the mystery would take Nicole. It takes a little while for the investigation to start, and I like that. The game does a good job of introducing us to Nicole and Irving, all while planting seeds in your head that could grow into something bigger. I definitely don't want to give too much away or spoil the ending, but I think it's safe to say that most people will find the twists and turns to be largely satisfying.

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Unfortunately, the way The Suicide of Rachel Foster tells its story didn't always work for me, sometimes literally. Because so much of the narrative is conveyed through the phone conversations, you can probably imagine how frustrating it is when the voice acting glitches out. I don't know if this is a problem with all versions, but the PlayStation 4 port has this issue where Irving's dialog would occasionally disappear. It just never triggers. Nicole would still choose the dialog options and hold the phone to her head, but there was nobody on the other side. That is, until the audio jarringly returns in the middle of an important message. The fact that this happened more frequently towards the end was frustrating, because I kept worrying that I would miss an important clue or twist.

And the truth is, I did miss important information because of the glitched audio. I found myself walking around in circles not knowing what to do because of a dropped line of dialog. I had to watch a playthrough on YouTube just to find out what Irving said. Then again, if I'm being honest, this game has a bad habit of not telling us what we're supposed to be doing. Sometimes you'll get clues in the conversation, but far more frequently you'll need to look at the map to see the current objective. The developers use the objective text like a crutch, when they should have found a more organic way to keep the player up-to-speed with what to do.

Speaking of which, I'm not a big fan of the way The Suicide of Rachel Foster is structured. Each chapter is revealed to be a different day, constantly reminding us how long Nicole has spent in the hotel. I like that, at least in theory. The problem is that Nicole only has one or two tasks every day, all of which can be completed in a few minutes. One day she'll turn on the furnace, and that's it. Another day she'll have a scary dream, and that's it. On yet another day, she'll need to turn on the emergency power generator, and that's it. Sure, she'll also talk to Irving, but she doesn't get much done. It gives off the impression that Nicole is either really lazy or constantly sleeping. Pretty much everything she does in the game could have been completed in one day, or maybe over a weekend. There's absolutely no reason to drag the days out like that, and I found that it ultimately made the story less believable.

Between the slow burn and entire days where not much happens, I can imagine some gamers growing bored waiting for the scares. I like that tension comes from the reveals and not cheap jump scares, but there will definitely be players who find walking around the hotel while talking on the phone to be more tedious than terrifying. While I enjoyed the mystery, I'm not going to blame you if you quickly lose interest in Nicole's trip back home.