HomeReviewsThe Suicide of Rachel Foster
Wot I Think: The Suicide Of Rachel FosterSnow joke
Snow joke
Release:Out nowOn:WindowsFrom:Steam,GOGFor:£15, $18, €17
If you couldn’t tell from the title,The Suicide Of Rachel Fostermakes sure you know it’s about proper issues with one of them big content warning screens up front. Normally these feel a bit like grandstanding. There are sensible ways to deliver content warnings, and a game signposting that it is extremely serious business in massive white letters on a black background usually means that, in reality, the contents of it are pretty milquetoast.
I would have said that about The Suicide Of Rachel Foster too, at least based on the bulk of the game. It’s a decent enough first person explorey mystery along the lines ofFirewatchorGone Home, but, you know, not as good as either of those. Then, in the last half hour or so, it goes properly off the rails and the content warning is proven necessary. Not in a good way.
Look, you know me. I’ll forgive a lot for a mystery where I noodle around an empty building full of sweet, sweet environmental storytelling. The Suicide Of Rachel Foster is actually really good at that, too. The apartment where Nicole’s dad lived out his mouldering last days in a likewise mouldering hotel, for example, is full of books about physics, the stars, and space. But around his bed you find tomes about ghosts, and how to talk to the dead. Leonard’s thinking had, we can infer, changed over the last decade. And there isn’t a voiceover telling us that - it’s just something to look at and understand. That’s cool!
There are isolated pockets in the building where you busy yourself most often - the apartment, the offices, the basement - but in between are corridors of empty rooms that you can’t enter, which might as well be blank space. Similarly, you find tools that have a specific purpose (a Polaroid camera that you use when the lights go out, or a parabolic mic to track spooky noises) but each is only used once, in one set piece, and so they end up feeling spare.
One could tenuously argue that this is because of the point of view that we see the events from, and that the game is clearly aware of how creepy the situation was. Nicole has a dream in which she hears her father asking if she knows how much he loves her. “Tell me again, daddy,” she says. “I love you… Rachel,” he replies, at which point I involuntarily made a BLEH face and looked away from the screen. But after that, there’s no tussling with the implications of Leonard’s actions; rather, the characters consider Rachel’s situation in the light of Claire and Nicole herself being jealous. I know moments ago I was praising the environmental storytelling not telling me what to think, but in this case both Irving and Nicole end up very defensive about Leonard and Rachel’s relationship, and I could have done with at least one person leading a coalition for reason.
The denouement of the whole thing is a weird clanger of epic proportions, and I’m going to spoil it here. So if you were planning to play The Suicide Of Rachel Foster, then here the review stops for you.
At the end of the game, Nicole finds herself alone, it being revealed that Claire battered Rachel to death with a hockey stick out of the aforementioned jealousy. Events now suggest that, in fact, both Leonard and Claire eventually took their own lives. Irving has walked out into the snow for extremely unlikely reasons I won’t go into.
And then, a black screen clears to reveal Nicole sitting in the front of her car, with a piece of pipe taped through the window. And you have to turn the engine on, and then either turn it off again, or sit in the fumes until Nicole dies! Seems like Rachel is the only one who didn’t commit suicide after all, jazz hands! The content warning at the start is necessary, then. But not because the game discusses sucide frankly or sensitively or in a meaningful way, but because you can actuallydoit. The scene isn’t even earned through what the game does up until that moment. It justhappens.
I don’t even know how to end this review now. I kind of want to just present those facts at the end, and then point vehemently at them. Which is basically what happens in The Suicide Of Rachel Foster, I suppose. In which case, reading this review is a pretty good replica of the experience of playing.
