WordPlayer: The Suicide of Rachel Foster Doesn't Work, But I 100% Completed It Anyway

The Suicide of Rachel Foster sat in my PlayStation backlog for five years. A review code was received at its PS4 release, then a potential review commission fell through, and occasionally I'd look at it in the list of games on the external hard drive attached to my PS5, thinking, "I wonder what that one's about?" Approximately a year ago, the game received a surprise PS5 "Definitive Edition" upgrade, complete with a free upgrade path, and suddenly, I had a slightly fancier version of the game. That's the one I played for this column, and it is, I think, surely the best way to play it.

The Suicide of Rachel Foster casts players as Nicole Wilson, a woman who has returned to her family's old abandoned hotel, the Timberline, to have it valued ahead of a sale. The Timberline holds a lot of bad memories for Nicole - ten years earlier (in 1983), her family was the center of a local scandal involving her father grooming a local 16-year-old girl, Rachel (based on the name of the game, you can guess what happened next). Nicole soon finds herself stuck alone in the hotel due to a snowstorm, and her only company is FEMA agent Irving Crawford, who speaks to her via a chunky 90s cell phone. Because the year is 1993, no one says, "wow, this is just like that game Firewatch, hey?"

Let me get this out of the way - I didn't really like The Suicide of Rachel Foster. It is a game with tremendous sound design, some great moments, and a lot of atmosphere, but also a narrative that collapses if you look at it with any level of scrutiny. It's the sort of game where if you ask "but wait, why did X character do Y", the answer may as well be a shrug. One where you might read the Wikipedia synopsis afterwards and think, "so I didn't miss anything, it's all just very silly." I would imagine that "silly" is not a word you want to conjure up when your game is dealing with subject matter like this, but the twists, turns, and emotional beats in the last third of the game don't make a lot of sense. I can't recommend it, especially for how haphazardly it deals with some very heavy subject matter.

So why did I play the game through to its conclusion? There are a few reasons: it's very short (about three hours) and straightforward (there aren't really puzzles per se), and, well, I have a column to write. But I would have persisted even if I didn't plan on writing about it, I believe, for two reasons: the PS5 version's excellent implementation of the DualSense controller and the very easy Platinum trophy tied to the game. I feel comfortable with one of these reasons and less comfortable with the other, but I can't deny that the idea of adding to my meager collection of Platinum PlayStation trophies was a factor.

When I realised that the game had a short and straightforward trophy list, and a high completion rate, I figured - hey, I might as well. I quickly flicked through a few guides to figure out which trophies I might potentially miss if I wasn't careful, and I kept revisiting them throughout to make sure I was on track. I went into each new game chapter knowing which parts of the game I had to be careful not to miss if I wanted that piece of digital ephemera to pop at the end. This meant that I experienced the game fully in one sense, but also that I proceeded through it with less of a sense of discovery than I might have otherwise. I wonder if that ultimately made me care a little less about the game's plot, since it became a smaller part of why I was playing the game - even though this is, ostensibly, a game one would expect to play entirely for the story.

This whole incident has me thinking about how many mediocre narrative-focused games I've played in the past, because I wanted to play a short, easy game and boost some metric. And as much as I've dedicated a portion of my life to the storytelling potential of games, I'll be honest - this has absolutely happened several times. I've made sure to finish dodgy point-and-clicks, flavourless walking sims, or pretentious, tedious experiences on consoles because I know that I put some value in being able to point at the proof that I finished them. 

How often am I engaging with narratives because of some metric, whether external or internal - a number that will tick up if we get to the end? I think about my Goodreads account, and how I'll set myself a reading goal at the beginning of the year that I then strive to hit. Sometimes this feels like a healthy thing to do, because it ensures that I am taking an experience I like and giving myself extra incentive to do it. Sometimes it feels like I have given myself homework, and that if I am not actively reading, I am failing. And, yes, it may push me to keep going on a book I am not enjoying if I see the end in sight, because I know my weird arbitrary number that no one else is paying attention to will go up. Finishing a game for the trophies doesn't feel so different.

Back in 2018, I wrote a piece for IGN about my Xbox Gamerscore fixation and the palpable negative impact it had on the way I played games - and how, having just hit 100,000 GS, I was hoping that I would be able to disconnect from paying any attention to this number. I went and checked my Xbox Gamerscore while writing this, and it stands at 123,016: that's not a big increase for eight years, although I wonder how much of that is me breaking a habit and how much is the complete and utter collapse of the Xbox brand.

PlayStation trophies have, historically, meant far less to me, and it wasn't until March of last year that I got my first Platinum - that's just not how I was playing games. As of now, I have five, and I'd say all of them are in games with a strong story focus: Immortality, Paradise Killer, Broken Sword, Promise Mascot Agency, and The Suicide of Rachel Foster. The first three are some of my favourite games of all time, and PMA was fantastic, so The Suicide of Rachel Foster is now the first game I've gotten a Platnium trophy in despite not liking it. That feels like a slippery slope.

On the other hand, the DualSense stuff really is great. I've been a big fan of the PlayStation 5 controller - despite the terrible battery life and weird build quality issues they seem to suffer from - and The Suicide of Rachel Foster makes some of the best use of the controller's capabilities I've seen and felt. The way it evokes Nicole's heartbeat during tense moments is particularly cool, and I love how the game uses the controller speaker to occasionally ramp up the tension - it's a game without jump scares, but it's still effectively spooky. 

The DualSense implementation really elevates the game, and I feel much more comfortable citing that as a reason I was able to keep going. It's not always the story itself in story-focused games that can pull you in, after all; sometimes it's the rich graphics and quality art, sometimes it's the soundtrack, or some singular, unique mechanic. It's rare for that one thing to be the controls, but that really is the case here.

I think games can be and do anything. They don't need to focus on "fun" or "value" or whatever, and they can exist just to tell stories. But game ecosystems are fundamentally built around pillars of competitiveness and tech innovation in ways that can mesh weirdly with the games themselves. You can play a game like this and come away saying "well, the game is bad, the story is bad, BUT it's got an easy Platinum and really shows off the controller technology well". Finishing The Suicide of Rachel Foster really has me re-examining my own motivations; next time, I'll make sure I write about a better game.