I was hoping the Timberline would contain a darkroom, so I could discover what I'd unwittingly photographed while using the Polaroid's flash to navigate during a blackout. These items tantalise with the thought of Paranormal Activity-style forensic investigations. You've got a paper map with the objective doodled on it, and Nicole picks up a few tools to help her explore - a Polaroid camera, a hand-cranked torch and a radar-dish microphone, borrowed from some long-fled ghost-hunters. Each chapter is mostly about going from A to B, whether to fetch beans from the larder, restart a generator or investigate a distant noise. It's a straightforward journey of self-discovery, nudged along by a very undemanding to-do list. Keeping you company throughout this unintended vigil is Irving, a boyish FEMA agent who contacts you over cellphone to offer survival tips, banter and a sympathetic ear, as Nicole sifts through old belongings and revisits her relationship with her dad. Fate, as ever, intervenes, and Nicole is trapped for several days by a snowstorm, holing up in her old teenage room and scouring the property for supplies. With both her parents and Rachel now deceased, Nicole has returned to survey the Timberline before selling it off and washing her hands of a painful upbringing. Years ago, she and her mother fled the property after learning of her father's infidelity with the titular Rachel, a 16-year-old girl. You play Nicole, daughter of the hotel's owners. At least, that is, until the memories those walls contain emerge into the light. Where mood is concerned, The Suicide of Rachel Foster trusts its architecture to do the heavy lifting. Mixed in amongst these mildly threatening objects are hints of outright paranormal activity - a point on the stair where you can hear a voice (or could it be the squeak of carpet on wood?), a strange pink butterfly, hovering by a gap in the wall - but the spooky elements are sparingly deployed. You'll find those legendary geometric carpet patterns, a mountain diorama akin to the Overlook's model maze, and bathrooms painted a diabolical red. It's also a not-so-discreet homage to The Shining's Overlook Hotel, which means that the sightlines and decor feel vaguely predatory, like they're trying to get into your head. Spread over three storeys plus a basement and carpark, the Timberline is closer to a Comfort Inn than some Gothic resort, but in the absence of holidaymakers and staff, its spaces loom. Developers: One O One Games, Reddoll Games, Reddoll S.R.L., Centounopercento - 101%.Photographs stare from the ends of corridors, shrouded objects tempt you to pull back the sheet, and stainless steel kitchens tease your fight-or-flight circuits with their abundance of gleaming points and angles. Floorboards creak, window-frames rattle, beams shift under a mounting weight of snow. You can roam about freely from the outset, though chapter breaks teleport you from room to room, and to do so is to be gently assaulted by the peculiarities of a structure that wouldn't seem out of place in Silent Hill. This is one thing the creators of The Suicide of Rachel Foster grasp well, though their workmanlike blend of Firewatch and Gone Home is ultimately tripped up by a half-baked story.Ī three-hour, first-person psychodrama with a gossamer-thin dusting of puzzles, the game is set in the Timberline Lodge, an abandoned mountainside hotel in 1990s Montana. Indeed, the more actual, overt threat you add to such a setting, the less fear it inspires - better to let your visitor wander undisturbed, drinking in the silence of the hallways and spotting goblin faces in the contours of broken plaster. It doesn't take much to make a big, old, empty house feel creepy. A story of love and death, where melancholy and nostalgia melt into a thrilling ghost tale.The setting is elegantly eerie, but this Gone-Home-inspired first-person mystery struggles to overcome its tired, melodramatic story. With the will and determination to put that chapter behind her, she returns to the hotel with the family’s lawyer to audit the decaying structure.As the weather unexpectedly turns for the worst, Nicole has no way to leave the large mountain lodge, and finds support in Irving, a young FEMA agent, using one of the first radio telephones ever built.With his help, Nicole starts to investigate a mystery far deeper than what people in the valley thought. 1993LEWIS & CLARK COUNTY, MONTANA, USTen years ago, teenager Nicole and her mother left the family hotel after discovering her father Leonard's affair with, and pregnancy of Rachel, a girl her own age who eventually committed suicide.Now that both of her parents have passed, Nicole hopes to fulfill her mother’s last will to sell the hotel and make amends to Rachel's relatives.
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