hard to discuss and criticize The Suicide of Rachel Foster without spoilers.

It’s hard to discuss and criticize The Suicide of Rachel Foster without spoilers. After the first half hour of the passage, Suicide seemed to have complete order with the plot. However, in stories related to the mysterious past and personal tragedies, it is important to maintain a balance between consistency and entertainment – the developers from ONE-O-ONE GAMES could not. They followed the path of the late Shyamalan with story twists for the sake of a “wow effect”.

Interesting tie

In The Suicide of Rachel Foster, we play for the girl Nicole, who, after the death of her parents, comes to an abandoned family hotel to sell it and forever forget her dark past. Her family broke up when Nicole was 16 – her father had an affair with her one-year-old Rachel Foster, who became pregnant and committed suicide.

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We stop by the hotel for 15 minutes to pick up the documents, but stay there for almost ten days due to the storm. The heroine is rolled up with memories of her father, past life, mother and Rachel. Here we are given strange hints that the girl who committed suicide is still alive. Events take place in the 1990s – there is no Internet, so Nicole was torn off from the outside world. The only thing she has is a telephone on which you can talk with an emergency hotline specialist, Irwin.

How to artificially stretch a game

The gameplay in The Suicide of Rachel Foster is as simple as possible: find room “A” to press button “B”, and then tell Irwin about it, and the plot will move on – and so on throughout the game. The real investigation, as, for example, in The Council, will not be here. There are no things or evidence in Suicide that you can miss and lose important information because of this.

It is not necessary to study the house, which was made really magnificent, just follow the instructions that Irwin will throw or Nicole herself will come up with. They may be satisfied with clumsy ones – for example, it is necessary to calculate the source of a strange sound, and I walked around the hotel with a special microphone and a sensor. He showed the maximum level in completely different places – sounds were heard on all four floors. I spent about 50 minutes searching. Sometimes it seemed that such a nebula in the setting of tasks, an absolutely inconvenient map and the tortoise step of the main character were specially added to the game to stretch its duration. The first time I passed Suicide in 3.5 hours, the second in 30 minutes.

Plunging into insanity

Despite the shortcomings of the gameplay, at first the game captivates and captures. The scenery of the hotel is worked out to the smallest detail. The once magnificent four-story building with a dozen walkways, which is empty and is now slowly dying, is given by Faulkner. The impoverishment and degeneration of wealthy families always looks tragic. Walking around the hotel is boring in terms of gameplay, but aesthetically beautiful. Suicide has nice graphics and a soundtrack that help you immerse yourself in the story and believe in it.

After our arrival, the hotel slowly begins to be filled with a certain mystery. And this gradual immersion in mystery is a definite plus of the game. There are no banal screamers or nightmares in which the heroine sees ghosts. The user himself begins to pay attention to some oddities: for example, walking along the corridor, you can hear a quiet chuckle, a man’s cough, or a fleeting word. The game does not focus on this attention, but throws such little things carefully. At first it’s not even completely clear whether you really heard a strange knock in the game, or if you just heard. In all these little things there is no element of horror. Thanks to this, there is intrigue – is there a ghost here? Is Rachel really alive? Is Nicole going crazy?

At some point, I already saw how this story could have developed about a girl whose childhood experiences, grievances and pain from losing her family spill out in the form of incomprehensible phenomena in the house. Separation from the whole world makes her illusions more realistic, she begins to animate the hotel, recalling episodes of the past. And the only ray of adequacy in this madness is Irwin, who should help the girl get out of all this. And so the story began, but then everything went in a completely different direction.

Madness Turns Into Farce

Despite the increasing number of oddities, Nicole hardly changes: “How did I end up in an abandoned church at night? Apparently, I go at night. ” She begins to swim in the story: she is flirting with Irwin, looking at the secret room, running somewhere – it does not matter.

It seems that the developers at some point simply did not know what to do with Nicole. They positioned her as a persistent, self-sufficient girl who could even cheat on Irvine, then showed her weak, and then they became bored with working on the image. The creators of the game wanted to move the plot, sparkle with unexpected twists and some bright provocative ending to catharsis right at your fingertips.

All unhurriedly scattered clues and sprouts in the development of Nicole’s image immediately became unnecessary. Then begins the farce, a set of events with a “wow effect” that cross out the logic of the previous narrative. Developers in the end begin to pour all kinds of revelations, facts, but they are incoherent and ridiculous. And at the same time, the funny thing is, they do not produce this “wow effect”. It turns out like in a cheap detective story, where in the end it turns out that the killer is a butler, who is actually an agent of the DPRK. Yes, the turn is sharp, but it is unlikely to hit the viewer – rather, it will cause a smile or a dismissive smirk.

I play the guitar – I’m a personality

Suicide has a wide variety of items to interact with. I scrupulously examined every book of Father Nicole Leonard and all his documents, but they do not affect the understanding of the plot or the disclosure of the image.

In conditional Control, through the reports found, the player plunged into the history of the world, collecting fragmentary facts into the big picture, and in Suicide it’s just a sham. A similar situation with things of Nicole herself. We can inspect her old skate, listen to a story about her hockey achievements and even watch a short cut scene where she plays the guitar. Did this help me understand the heroine as a person? Not.

In the first season of Life is Strange, there was a similar scene where you could play the guitar for Max in her room. However, that episode harmoniously fit into the image that the developers created. In Suicide, a guitar is just a guitar. A set of characteristics listed out loud or shown as an exhibit – “I love hockey”, “I am strong and fearless”, “I play the guitar” – looks more like a standardized resume of a philology graduate, except for sociability and multitasking.

The developers also for some reason added answer options in the dialogs – it is possible that we ourselves create the right image of Nicole. However, this function turned out to be a fiction: the player’s choice does not affect anything except the tonality of the girl’s replicas.

Suicide – this is not an option, especially for screenwriters

For many games, such semi-carton images are fine, but not for Suicide. ONE-O-ONE GAMES put the inner experiences and pain of a particular person in the center of the plot, but for the player Nicole remains a stranger. How to empathize, empathize and understand her actions, if it is really not clear who she is? Nicole could “save” the leaky plot and the controversial ending, because the stories of broken people cling to the audience, but only if we see this process of falling into the abyss, we know its causes and premises. Otherwise, everything slips into the sketch of one famous blogger: “Why did he do this? He’s crazy! ”

While loading Suicide, a warning appears that the game touches on serious topics and is not suitable for people with anxiety. The latest developers suggest contacting the support hotlines. When I saw this inscription for the first time, I thought that now they will show me a really interesting dramatic title with a subtle psychologism and social background that even a man on the brink can be saved if you try to calm his demons and give him hope. But here the topic of suicide is just a plot crutch.

Indie games like The Suicide of Rachel Foster are not about gameplay, it just isn’t there. They are about the plot, the idea and the emotional experience that the player should get. The Suicide of Rachel Foster is like a music video with beautiful scenery and a hint of a thought that has never been formulated.