Welcome again to Discussion: [indie game] (spoilers!), a series in which we discuss an indie game, with spoilers.

Today’s game is The Suicide of Rachel Foster (developed by One O One Games and published by Daedalic Entertainment in 2020), in which you play as Nicole Wilson, a young woman returning, after the death of her parents, to an abandoned hotel that was once her childhood home.

It’s a place that brings back unpleasant memories for Nicole, whose family life was torn apart following revelations of her father Leonard’s affair with a teenage girl, the eponymous Rachel, who was later found to have taken her own life.

Normally at this point I’d drop a teaser trailer here and offer generic encouragement to spend time with the game before proceeding. However, unlike in most of the games we’ve covered thus far, the serious topics within, and how they’re handled here, are cause for some concern.

If you think you know what you’re getting into from the name of the game and the brief synopsis above, be warned: you’re not. It makes some rather alarming decisions at various points, particularly towards the end, and it’s a hard one to recommend as a result of some of its missteps. So some caution is advised, especially as the trailer makes it look quite good.

Ok? Now here’s your ***FINAL SPOILER WARNING*** for the discussion below.

 

The Something of Someone Something

Jo: Here we are again!

Rik: Well, shall we just start with me saying: this was my choice, and it is quite a bad game and I am sorry.

Jo: I think we both put it on the list though.

Rik: The irony is, we talked previously about the name being a bit copy/paste from other titles, and then the game itself turns out to be the same.

Jo: We did indeed. Typically, I only heard murmurings that it wasn’t very good *after* I had bought it.

Rik: I suppose all that can be said is, if you wait for sales, then these games don’t cost much, and don’t take up too much of your time. It’s kind of like watching a disappointing film. Or maybe six episodes of an iffy series.

Jo: Yeah I agree. Especially in this case, I’m happy I didn’t pay full price.

Rik: That said, this is probably the first game we’ve discussed that I might not advise anyone just to go in blind with and ‘give it a go’. I think potentially people could find it upsetting, and not in a ‘this is powerful’ kind of way, more a ‘this is badly misjudged’ kind of way.

Jo: I agree on all fronts – I certainly wouldn’t go freely recommending it.

Rik: What did you know about it going in?

Jo: Nothing really, to be honest. Probably less than I knew about the others we’ve played. But I had got wind that it wasn’t great – so my expectations were very, very low.

Rik: It’s a very new game compared with the others. Possibly the newest game ever covered on FFG!

Jo: Did it come out last year?

Rik: Yep, 2020. I think in the middle of one of our previous chats, we mentioned it as something that had come out fairly recently: another first-person adventure with a name like, ‘The something of someone something…’

Jo: Yes, as we were talking about getting the names muddled up. Did you know anything more going in?

Rik: I think maybe I got wind of some misgivings expressed in reviews, which I started digging into slightly and then backed away from, as I thought we’d likely still play it. But most of those misgivings focused on the ending, so I thought maybe it might be a mixed bag… but actually it is quite bad from the start, in my view.

Jo: I don’t know if it’s because I went in with such low expectations, but certainly initially I thought it was ok. I was quite enjoying it and was intrigued enough to keep going, but it took a turn, got worse, and then suddenly a *lot* worse. I felt much less forgiving during my second playthrough.

Rik: I mean, you’re someone who likes to explore. I found it weird that you could barely look at or do anything.

Jo: Me too. Given the scale of the hotel, I thought that there would be a lot to uncover, but that really isn’t the case.

Rik: It is a really interesting setting. But right from the start, I was trying to look at things, and it won’t let you do anything at all until you go where you’re meant to go.

Jo: Yeah, it’s very clunky in that respect. We’ve talked about being on rails vs pointless romping before. The magic balance is where you are on rails, but it doesn’t feel that way, so you feel free to roam around but the story still unfolds as it should. Here, you can very much see the rails.

Rik: It definitely feels like they made this big hotel then ran out of time and put a quite short story on top of it. Which is possible, I guess.

Jo: There really isn’t a good range of interaction with objects. There are a lot of things that you can’t even pick up, and even the handful that you can interact with are pointless.

Rik: Yes, there’s a very L.A. Noire approach to objects…

Jo: The things you pick up don’t even give away any narrative nuggets.

Rik: There’s almost no point in looking around, unless you really like wandering through static rooms with nothing to do.

Jo: I got lost in this a lot. Like, a LOT.

Rik: Me too. It’s symptomatic of the poor design I think.

Jo: I didn’t really go exploring too much because from one minute to the next I couldn’t figure out where the heck I was. Some of it is arguably down to my poor directional skills, but I constantly got turned around – much more so even than in something like Firewatch where you’re roaming around in the forest.

Rik: There are ways to contrive things and control how you explore the hotel. And this game does use some, but it’s not very skilfully done. You can basically go anywhere, and loads of rooms have no point at all. To me it feels like it’s trying to copy better games but fundamentally misunderstands what was good about them.

Jo: There’s no getting away from the obvious similarities to both Firewatch and Gone Home. I didn’t like the use of the phone with Irving [Edit: the other major character, who works for FEMA and contacts you via an early-90s mobile… yes, it’s set in the 90s, for some reason], it just seems totally unnecessary.

Rik: It invites comparisons with both, comparisons which don’t do it any favours. For example, in Gone Home, you pick up objects and, even if they don’t prompt a voiceover, they tell you something about what happened in this place and who lived there. In The Suicide of Rachel Foster, there’s a billion physics books.

Jo: Oh man, I looked at so many of them hoping to find out… I dunno… *something*

Rik: ‘Nicole’s dad was a professor’. That’s it. He’s a professor and he likes to have sex with young girls. Great. Then you go in Nicole’s room, and it’s like, ‘She likes playing bass and ice hockey’. That’s not giving life to your characters.

Jo: I know we’ll get to this later in our discussion but I also found that an awful lot of the story made absolutely no sense.

Rik: You mean like the fact that Nicole has come up to this creepy hotel in the middle of a snowstorm?

Jo: Yeah, it’s a bit of a plot-hole-fest, that one being the biggest and it’s right from the off. There’s this terrible storm – reportedly the worst in however many years – so it seems like a pretty bad time to go to the one place you refused to return to ever again.

Rik: Most people would be like, ‘Oh Christ, I don’t want to get STUCK there!’

Jo: I know!!

Rik: Also she goes from being a fairly strong character to wilting fairly quickly. And I didn’t really understand why she warms to Irving either.

Jo: No, it seems to be in the absence of anyone else and not in a [Firewatch protagonists] Henry and Delilah type way where they’re both kind of outcasts and build up a relationship over a number of weeks. Here, this unlikely bond forms almost instantly.

Rik: Also I didn’t understand his explanation for why FEMA take an interest in a remote hotel? He’s like, ‘it’s our job to know about the hotel’… er, is it?

Jo: Yeah and she’s like ‘ok fair enough’

Rik: But, fine, it’s a setup to do a Firewatch thing. To the extent that the interface looks like Firewatch: ‘report X’.

Jo: Yes, exactly. It doesn’t even really try to hide it, which I’d be okay with (to an extent) but it also doesn’t make sense. In Firewatch, there was a clear and plausible reason for Henry to report in to Delilah.

Rik: And then Nicole and Irving share extremely witless back and forth throughout, which seems to endear him to her, although I’m not sure why at all.

Jo: I didn’t at any point like the main character…

Rik: I was with her when her attitude was, ‘fuck off! I want to leave this place’. I quite liked her then.

Jo: I didn’t like her from the off. But I got the impression it was geared that way so you didn’t like her to start and then maybe warm to her as things unfold.

Rik: You probably are, but it was the opposite for me.

Jo: Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like Irving either.

 

Putting on weight

Rik: It’s probably worth saying there are problems with localisation when it comes to the script. I hesitate to blame the translation, but so much of their dialogue just doesn’t quite scan. It’s either badly written or badly localised (or both). The game has them building chemistry, but that isn’t apparent from their conversations.

Jo: Yeah I agree, but I’d say that’s the feel of the whole game. It keeps trying to tug at your heartstrings but misses; it keeps giving the impression it will build the mystery but doesn’t.

Rik: All the things that you need to do for a game like this to be good, this one doesn’t do. There’s a few examples of clumsiness I wrote down, like in the opening letter from your mum…

Jo: Oh my god, yes!

Rik: ‘The affair your father had 9 years ago’ – that detail is for the player, not the character.

Jo: And it’s signed ‘Your mother’ – not, you know, ‘Mum’ or ‘Mom’. I also didn’t understand what the bits in quotation marks were at the bottom, and then another bit of text not in quotation marks.

Rik: I didn’t, although it later occurred to me, after you get to choose dialogue options, that the quotes were probably Nicole’s internal monologue as she reads the letter.

Jo: I won’t jump the gun, but I also felt like the dialogue choices didn’t make sense. Why is it an option to say “…” and then have no other option? That’s not actually an option.

Rik: There are some slightly ‘off’ translations there too, and as the timer ticks down you don’t quite have time to process them. Another exchange I didn’t like was when you have to go into the crawl space, and Irving says, “Perhaps you have put on weight?” Maybe that’s just the bad script. But it makes no sense for him to say that.

Jo: Yes, that was awful. And also made no sense given that she was clearly a child when she lived there.

Rik: Also, this isn’t exactly a mistranslation, but there’s extremely European swearing, which sounds weird with American accents. Do Americans say, ‘Fuck’s sake’? And at one point, she goes mad and says, “You don’t know shit, you don’t know… fuck!”

Jo: The swearing is all a little one note.

Rik: ‘Let’s serious this up a bit’.

Jo: Also, the story of ‘old farting ghost’ [the boiler]. It’s supposed to be endearing (I think) but I just found it very cringe-worthy. First time around I felt like I had missed something, and then second time I realised it was because it didn’t make sense.

Rik: The characters’ laughing at that point made me feel ill.

Jo: It would have made more sense if they had found it scary as kids and had actually created a ghost story based on the boiler noises. But to say it was ‘old farting ghost’ sort of suggests they weren’t afraid of it anyway?

Rik: And there doesn’t appear to be any point to including the story, or the visit to the boiler room anyway. There’s no later callback to a creepy noise down there, I don’t think? Along the same lines, I didn’t understand why Nicole’s sleepwalking isn’t introduced earlier in the game, with innocent consequences, so that when she does it again towards the end of the game, it doesn’t just sound like it’s been shoehorned in as an explanation for her randomly waking up in a creepy room? At least do the groundwork…

Jo: There’s a lot of the old telling rather than showing. I feel there’s potential here, but it misses (in a big way) every opportunity that it presents.

Rik: There’s definitely something good that could have been made with hunting around that old hotel.

Jo: I think there’s potential for a good ghost story (old abandoned hotels are creepy, after all) and it would still be fine if there wasn’t really a ghost at the end or even if it was left ambiguous.

Rik: I was sort of going with it all in the first playthrough. I ignored the bad banter, and realised early on that all you could look at were books and spirit levels, and you just had to go where you were told. Even though that’s clumsily handled, because sometimes you need to look at the map to find out what you’re doing, and at other times you’re just waiting for the phone to ring.

Jo: Sometimes I’d look at the map to remind myself what I should be doing and be a bit surprised by the answer because the action hadn’t suggested it at all. I felt like the aim was to get lost wandering around for a while to allow enough time to elapse before the next thing happens (e.g. the phone ringing in the corridor). The trigger points seemed random. If you figure out where you should be quicker than the game anticipates, you end up backtracking and waiting for it to catch up.

Rik: The timing on all of that should be better. So that you’re already doing something when the phone goes, instead of having moments where you’re like, what am I doing now? And you already know that there’s not much point in exploring…

Jo: No, because early on you realise you’re not going to find anything.

Rik: It’s not like Firewatch where you set off going to do something and then the walkie-talkie goes.

Jo: The exposition is all in the dialogue. You don’t fill in any of the blanks yourself.

 

Murder, She Ghost

Rik: But, like you said earlier, it still has your attention, during the first few days. It’s only when it veers into a murder mystery, and then a ghost story in quick succession…

Jo: When you get to that part where you’re ‘reviewing the evidence’ (which is ripped off Firewatch again), I was a bit thrown.

Rik: It loses its way there.

Jo: There’s not much leading up to that point to get you to feel like Nicole wants to figure something out.

Rik: Specifically, she *isn’t* bothered about finding things out. She’s spent a long time avoiding it all.

Jo: Exactly. There’s no motivation for her to find out what happened to Rachel, so where does it suddenly come from?

Rik: Her whole thing is that she doesn’t care. And Irving says she shouldn’t bother either. Then there’s suddenly a lot of stuff about how Nicole and Rachel knew each other, which isn’t clear from earlier in the game. She was just ‘some girl’…

Jo: Finding the lipstick seems to be this key moment, but it meant nothing to me. I felt like I had missed something. It makes out that both the player and Nicole have twigged onto something crucial, but I was with Irving when he seemed indifferent and said, ‘it’s just a lipstick’.

Rik: Why is the lipstick interesting and not the cigarettes or any of the other bits?

Jo: Not the notes or the equations or documents you find all over the place. There’s random shit lying around everywhere and no other reference to lipstick elsewhere in the game, and then completely out of nowhere it’s of great significance. If I found some old makeup in an abandoned hotel, I would feel like that tracked. Like, yeah, it was left here a long time ago… just like all the other crap in here.

Rik: You go with it because maybe there’s an explanation later. That’s always a possibility first time around. Around this point you also find out that Rachel was 16. Which is something we’ll get onto, but it’s on the edge of ‘this guy had an affair with a young girl’ and ‘this guy is a paedophile’. But then as you start getting into that, all this new ghost story stuff starts up. I really didn’t follow that gear change at all, even though the video you find of the film crew freaking out is quite effective.

Jo: No, me neither. It’s suitably creepy – there’s a lot of creaking and wandering around in the dark after watching that video, but it just didn’t seem to fit with anything else that had happened so far.

Rik: How dark was it for you?

Jo: Too dark.

Rik: Those bits where Nicole says she’s scared and you need the torch… I didn’t need it. I wondered if I’d messed up the brightness settings.

Jo: Ah, I couldn’t see anything.

Rik: Then there’s the search for a noise using the crew’s microphone, which was a bit annoying.

Jo: Oh, that bit is *really* annoying.

Rik: What was that noise, and why/how did it lead you to that photograph? And is Irving’s weirdness at this point supposed to give you a clue as to his true motivations? I was just like, stop flirting with me. But then he won’t actually help you.

 

Not some kind of sicko

Rik: So, the ending is terrible. But I was actually quite surprised and excited at points. There’s a sense of danger about it all, when it’s revealed that Irving is *the killer in the house*.

Jo: Yeah, see, that was a bit of an anti-climax for me.

Rik: Did you see it coming?

Jo: I knew that there would be a ‘twist’ about Irving, just not what it was exactly.

Rik: But when it turns so quickly, I did have a buzz of excitement. And the mezzanine scene [with a murder re-enactment featuring mannequins] was the true ‘holy shit!’ kind of moment. Genuinely creepy and surprising. And then finding his room with his devious plans…

Jo: Yeah, the mezzanine scene was good.

Rik: But then it all quickly unravels again. Irving and his explanation is completely mad.

Jo: It’s absolutely bonkers. I still don’t understand it.

Rik: And it’s so weird how no-one seems that bothered about this old man doing it with a 16-year-old. Is Irving, as Rachel’s brother, really ok with it all? He seems to see it as a love story, which is very icky.

Jo: Yeah, there’s so much about the ending that’s wrong, I don’t even know where to start. Like when Nicole finds the secret bedroom/shrine thing downstairs, and it’s implied that her estranged father created it, she defends him for some reason and is really offended by the suggestion he would do such a thing.

Rik: But he already has done that thing.

Jo: Her dad, who had an affair with a teenager, as if he’s already held to a high standard.

Rik: Well, quite. ‘Look, he may have had an illicit relationship with a 16-year-old, but he’s not some kind of sicko…’

Jo: Exactly!

Rik: And all the stuff about Nicole and Rachel knowing each other and having a rivalry: that was really undercooked. We don’t really know that they know each other until quite far into the game.

Jo: That rivalry didn’t really get padded out at all. The other thing that baffled me about the hidden shrine room is that it looks like a young child’s room, but Rachel was a teenager.

Rik: The dungeon room makes him more like a paedophile. And then there’s the secret romance room with the projector, which is super creepy too.

Jo: With all the sketches. And the chess game – BLEUGH. I also didn’t understand what Leonard is going on about when Nicole switches the projector on.

Rik: No. That should be a poignant or meaningful moment, but isn’t. You don’t really get a sense of how Nicole feels about either parent.

Jo: Well, I think ultimately it boils down to the fact that none of the characters are fleshed out particularly. You don’t really know anything about any of them, never mind how the main character feels about them.

Rik: And then the actual, final, ending is really messed up. Because it makes no sense to me that she would be in that state of mind. [Edit: the finale cuts to a traumatised Nicole at the wheel of her car, having apparently set it up for an attempt at suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning].

Jo: No, it was really contrived.

Rik: I would have reverted back to Day 1 mode, let’s get out of here!

Jo: Me too. I just felt like it was ‘let’s make it really dark/sad/emotional’.

Rik: And actually, I found it very troubling and trivialises something very serious. I saw what was coming and was like, ‘oh, no, I’m not having this at all.’

Jo: Yeah, same.

Rik: The first time around, I left it to answer the door, and then when I came back the credits were rolling, so I had to watch the two endings on YouTube as it had autosaved as ‘finished’.

Jo: Are there different endings?

Rik: You can either kill yourself in your car, or turn the engine off.

Jo: Something we’ve not touched on yet is that the beginning of the game suggests your choices affect things, but I didn’t get that impression at all.

Rik: No.

Jo: I turned the engine off both times.

Rik: But even if you do, your character has either gone mad or is somehow possessed by the ghost of Rachel.

Jo: What she’s saying at the end doesn’t make sense – she’s talking to her parents like they’re all going to be be a happy family now.

Rik: Apparently on Steam and consoles you get an achievement for not turning the engine off, which implies that’s the ‘correct’ ending.

Jo: That is sick.

Rik: I suppose it all goes to show that the likes of Gone Home and Firewatch are skilfully put together.

Jo: I’m sorry to say it, but it did smack of imitation, and not in a good way. I’m fine with a little hat tip to other, similar games, but not when it’s just trying to replicate them.

Rik: It felt like someone tried to make a recipe using Gone Home, Firewatch and Ethan Carter. But did so by just mixing bits of them all together and hoping it worked. You have to think about the end result. Not just, scallops are nice, we’ll add some spaghetti bolognese, then top it off with a chocolate mousse.

Jo: Mmm… scallopetti bologmousse…

Rik: I think there’s a game here where you dig into your family history, Gone Home style. I’m not sure you need the Irving stuff at all. They could have just replaced that with an answerphone message that was like, ‘You’re cut off for a few days, so work it out’.

Jo: Yeah, I agree.

Rik: You, and the character, could work alone: ‘I need a shower, I’m sure the furnace was in the basement’ and then explore the hotel yourself, with memories coming back to you as you go into rooms, e.g. ‘we used to call the boiler old farting ghost, how lame!’ You don’t need Irving laughing along.

Jo: I think it lacked a proper story, first and foremost. Which makes the rest feel meaningless. You needed to find out more about each member of the family and the family as a whole.

Rik: Then it would possibly be more of a GH rip-off. But fine, why not, if it’s done well?

Jo: I think a decision needed to be made about the plot as a whole: is it a ghost story? Is it just going to seem like a ghost story, but actually you’re just trying to find out what happened?

Rik: I think you can be creeped out by the hotel, but that should be it. Isn’t it creepy enough that your dad had an affair with a very young girl here? Who then died?

Jo: But that’s what I mean, like if the ghost thing is the story, then make it the story. If it’s a story about what happened when you were younger, then make it about that. But it feels like they never made a choice. They went with all options!

Rik: I agree.

Jo: Also, it deals with some really serious issues in a very surface level and insensitive way.

Rik: There’s the warning at the beginning, and I thought, ok this is going to talk about the suicide of Rachel. But then to actually show the player character in a car with the exhaust redirected into the cabin… I’ve lived through the moral panics of Doom, GTA, etc. But this was one those times, possibly the first time ever, that I thought, ‘no, this is too much’.

Jo: It is too much, and it’s not even consistent with what’s happened in the game. Not that that would make it ok.

Rik: No. Nicole’s clearly not interested in digging everything up, then suddenly she is. And we’re meant to believe it’s through Irving’s skilful manipulation. Then suddenly she’s so shocked by her mum being the murderer (which makes total sense, actually) that she wants to kill herself? Unless she’s actually possessed by the ghost of Rachel, which I did not get until I read internet people suggesting it later.

Jo: I did not get that impression at all, but even if that was the case, that wouldn’t make sense either. Because, actually, Rachel didn’t kill herself. Or is it that Rachel possesses her because of the rivalry?

Rik: I’m not sure. But, to me, Nicole has no guilt in this. She doesn’t deserve that fate, unless she was somehow horrible to Rachel. Ach, it’s a mess.

Jo: Yes, messy. Messy and clumsy.

 

Mouldy pumpkins

Rik: What did you make of it overall?

Jo: I feel like, on the one hand, it had potential. If it had perhaps chosen to go in one direction and stuck with it, I might have got on with it slightly better. But on the other, I can’t really get past the clumsiness, total lack of consistency and insensitivity. I realise I keep saying this, but too much of it made absolutely no sense – it was just all over the place.

Rik: I suppose I expected a bad ending, but the rest of it is no good either, really. It’s interesting if you enjoy the genre and are curious to see failure as well as success.

Jo: Agree, and I don’t hold it in anywhere near as high regard as some of even the less enjoyable titles we’ve covered.

Rik: It shows that you can’t just have a generic sad story and creepy elements and make a critically acclaimed game. In a way this is one to wave in the faces of people who knock Gone Home etc. Anything else you wanted to mention?

Jo: No, I think I got everything off my chest. How about you?

Rik: I wondered why the coroner didn’t notice Rachel was murdered with a hockey stick when recording a verdict of suicide. Also, there are 2006-era England football jackets in the hotel, which was odd.

Jo: I wondered why the workman didn’t leave an actual torch behind instead of a dynamo – surely that would make their job especially difficult?

Rik: Also, why does Irving have the schematics of Nicole’s car? She didn’t break down. And if the car doesn’t work, how can you start it at the end? Also, when did you find your keys?

Jo: Also what are tinned frozen beans? Additionally, they do not seem like something you should put in the microwave. Why would a pumpkin go mouldy in the cold? Why would the only thing remaining in the pantry be pumpkins?

Rik: I think other games we’ve covered also suffer from having a fairly cute but implausible excuse to leave things as they were years ago. But this is so poor in other respects, that you really notice that as well.

Jo: That reminds me, so Leonard only just died, but the hotel looked like it had been abandoned for years?

Rik: They just say he’s a recluse. Perhaps the hotel wasn’t running but he still lived there… Anyway, it felt like we were scraping the barrel a bit with this one. I’m reluctant to recommend it. It wasn’t *terrible*. But a long way off lots of the others we’ve played. Anything else you want to mention?

Jo: No, I think I’m done.

Rik: Well, thanks for this, I enjoyed it as always. Until next time!

—

The Suicide of Rachel Foster is available on Steam and GOG for £14.99.