Category: reviews

Corpse Party

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Corpse Party is a 16-bit RPG Maker horror adventure game from 1996 that was released on multiple platforms before finally finding its way, in a substantially updated form, to the Nintendo Switch. It shows its age, but it’s definitely worth playing if you’re into retro-styled horror adventure games.

Corpse Party is divided into five chapters, each of which stands as a discrete unit accompanied by its own set of save files that can be selected from the main menu. Every chapter has a number of optional bad endings, but you need to achieve the good ending in order to unlock access to the next chapter. If you’re using a walkthrough, each chapter takes roughly an hour to complete.

You play as various members of a group of high school students who stayed late after school one evening to tell ghost stories. They unfortunately trigger a curse that transports them to an abandoned elementary school building that was shut down in the 1970s after a grisly series of abductions and murders. Different students occupy different pocket dimensions of the school, which is almost entirely cut off from reality. To make matters worse, your group of students isn’t the first batch of kids to be spirited away to the school, which is littered with corpses and haunted by vengeful ghosts. Your goal is to help the kids escape the school… if that’s even possible.  

Corpse Party is extremely gory, and not all the kids are going to make it. The game contains intense depictions of mutilation and self-harm accompanied by vivid textual descriptions and occasional environmental illustrations of an uncomfortably graphic nature. The violence occupies an intersection between disturbing, gross, and campy, and I thought it was a lot of fun.

The main challenges of Corpse Party are of the standard “find a key to unlock the door” adventure game variety. The layout of the school changes from scene to scene, but it’s not large enough to get lost in. Aside from avoiding the occasional wandering ghost, there are no reflex challenges, and your characters are very rarely in any immediate danger. If there were jump scares, they didn’t register with me. The 16-bit character sprites are very cute, even when they’re depicting corpses.

As far as horror games go, Corpse Party is relatively chill, but with one caveat:

Corpse Party is completely linear and frustratingly opaque about what you need to do to trigger the next event in any given sequence. Unless you want to walk through endless dark hallways searching every square of the map, you’re going to need a walkthrough to get through the game. The walkthrough people use is (this one), but the walkthrough can sometimes be just as opaque as the game itself.

Personally speaking, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I managed to get through the first two chapters of Corpse Party without using a walkthrough. These initial two chapters stand on their own as a story, and I felt that they were actually the best part of the game. I think it’s probably safe to say that the opening of Corpse Party is more than enough to satisfy someone with a casual interest and playstyle.

The characters are usually divided into interesting pairs, and most of what you’ll do in the game consists of walking around inside the ruins of the school building while having conversations. The kids are very good about following horror movie rules – they don’t split up or do anything stupid – but they’re at the complete mercy of the ghosts of the original murder victims, who will change the layout of the school or create traps just to mess with them. For the most part, the kids are good and gentle and kind to one another, which makes it all the more upsetting when something bad happens.

The characterization and conversations aren’t that deep, however, so you never get so attached to any character that you don’t want to see them die. My favorite death is when one of the kids gets slammed against a wall so hard that his body explodes into red pulp, which all the rest of the kids have to walk through for the remainder of the game while navigating that particular hallway intersection.

Through disjointed and disconnected teamwork, your characters learn what actually happened to the ghosts haunting the school. For curious lore hunters, there are various bits of text scattered around, from newspaper clippings to messages left by other victims of the curse. These textual passages start off as grim and gradually grow more disturbing, and it’s always a pleasure to find something new to read. There’s also an optional collection quest that encourages you to find and interact with all the corpses in each chapter; and, if you like, you can return to the main menu and read about all the horrible ways these kids died.

It’s probably more accurate to call Corpse Party a “visual novel” as opposed to an “adventure game,” but it’s fun to explore the school while interacting with various objects in the environment. It’s also fun to gain access to new areas, both to learn more about the story and to see more of the game’s pixel art. One of my favorite areas is the outdoor pool in Chapter 4, which is filled with waterlogged corpses and preceded by a hellishly filthy locker room. Good times.

Despite its frustrations, I really enjoyed Corpse Party, and the English translation created by XSeed is fantastic. While reading the game’s Wikipedia page (here), I learned that there’s a manga adaptation (here), and I had so much fun exploring this horrible haunted school that I started reading it. It’s just as ridiculous and over the top as you’d expect from a manga adaptation of a horror game, but each chapter has one or two really great horror scenes enhanced by lovingly detailed and disturbingly gruesome artwork.

Review of A Guest in the House on WWAC

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I had the pleasure of writing a review of Emily Carroll’s darkly brilliant graphic novel, A Guest in the House, for Women Write About Comics. The story gazes into the moonlit shadows of “traditional” families, and it’s gothic horror at its sexiest and most subversive. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Carroll’s visual representation of Abby’s inner world is brilliantly strange and gorgeously queer. In her more introspective moments, Abby indulges in a fantasy of herself as a heroic knight fighting dragons, who lay waiting for her, hot and wet in their dark caves. Having slain a dragon while remaining protected and genderless inside her full-body armor, Abby seeks comfort in the arms of the beautiful ladies that await her arrival. While the majority of the artwork in A Guest in the House is painted in black ink with gradations of gray, Abby’s fantasies practically scream from the page in lurid full color that slowly begins to bleed into Abby’s waking life.

You can read the full review here:
https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2023/10/a-guest-in-the-house-review/

If you’re interested, I also recommend checking out Emily Carroll’s website (here) for a curated selection of horror art and short comics. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s one of the best sites on the internet.

While I was writing this review, I told a friend that A Guest in the House is like Dark Souls, but if Dark Souls were about a housewife in rural Canada in the 1990s. I stand by this evaluation, and I think it makes sense given the artist’s love of FromSoft games. Carroll recently released a short fancomic about Bloodborne, and you can download it for free from Itchio (here). As with A Guest in the House, I might offer a content warning for body horror and violence, but the art and writing are gorgeous.

Review of The Hills of Estrella Roja on WWAC

~ Kathryn

I recently had the immense honor of being able to review emerging artist Ashley Robin Franklin’s brilliant Southwest Gothic graphic novel, The Hills of Estrella Roja, for Women Write About Comics.

Here’s an excerpt:

Even as Kat and Mari enjoy queer teen solidarity, they’re inducted into an adult world of queerness that was previously denied to them. Mari’s side of the story is especially interesting in this regard, as she gradually comes to understand that her identity isn’t just a matter of her own lived experiences, but also a product of the heritage shaped by the experiences of her extended family. The art of The Hills of Estrella Roja cleverly suggests connections between generations in subtle allusions and callbacks while immersing the characters in a gorgeous world that constantly reaches out (sometimes literally!) to pull Mari and Kat deeper into the natural environment that surrounds them.

You can read the full review here:
https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2023/08/the-hills-of-estrella-roja-review/

As always, I have nothing but gratitude for my editor, Kat Overland. Kat gave me the go-ahead to write a review of Franklin’s minicomic Fruiting Bodies and then helped me get in touch with Clarion Books to request an advance review copy of The Hills of Estrella Roja. I’m not used to playing in the big leagues, so Kat’s support was invaluable, as were their notes as a native Texan. For excellent taste and good-sense takes on comics, politics, and pop culture, you can follow Kat on Twitter (here) and on Bluesky (here).

You can follow Ashley Robin Franklin on Instagram (here), where she posts cute and colorful botanical studies and shorter autobiographical comics that are touching, relatable, and well worth reading.

Review of Soul Void on Sidequest

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I recently had the pleasure of writing a review of the Game Boy horror adventure game Soul Void for the online gaming magazine Sidequest. I love Soul Void, and I’d describe it as Undertale for people who love quirky adventures with elements of horror but hate bullet hell. Although the horror elements of Soul Void are quite gruesome, it’s accessible to players of all skill levels. The game is free to play on Itchio (here), but I’d recommend playing it on a Game Boy emulator like mGBA, which you can download (here). Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Soul Void is a dark fantasy Game Boy adventure game that takes about three hours to finish. Its story of a young woman navigating the perils of the underworld is intriguing and cathartic, and its art design makes incredible use of the eeriness of its retro pixel graphics. For anyone who enjoyed the characters and worldbuilding of Undertale, Soul Void offers a similarly offbeat odyssey of mystery and friendship illustrated with disturbing but brilliantly creative horror art.

You can read the full review here:
https://sidequest.zone/2023/08/21/review-soul-void-dives-deep-into-retro-body-horror/

I want to give a big shout-out to my editor, Maddi Butler, for helping me get my thoughts in order and work through some of the more interesting themes of this game. I’d also like to thank the Sidequest Editor in Chief, Melissa Brinks, for giving me an opportunity to write about Soul Void, and for allowing me to expand on my thoughts about this amazing game. For excellent writing and commentary on video games, you can follow Maddi on Bluesky (here) + Melissa on Twitter (here). If you’re in the mood for gorgeous horror art, you can follow Soul Void’s creator, Kabadura, on Twitter (here) and on Instagram (here).

Review of River’s Edge on WWAC

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I recently had the opportunity to review Kodasha USA’s release of Kyoko Okazaki’s 1994 graphic novel River’s Edge for Women Write About Comics.

River’s Edge is like an anti-shōjo manga about teenagers at the margins of society being evil to one another. This is the sort of gritty “all the trigger warnings” graphic novel that I wouldn’t recommend to everyone, but I really enjoyed it. I think it’s an important piece of art, and I’m grateful that it’s available in English. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Even to readers not interested in manga classics or sociopolitical critiques of millennial Japan, River’s Edge tells an engrossing tale of teenagers precariously close to falling out of mainstream society. Characters who initially seem to be stereotypes gain fascinating depth and complexity as their lives spiral out of control over the course of a story that rapidly gains momentum. River’s Edge isn’t entirely bleak, however. The footholds the characters find in the landslide are meaningful, and their small moments of genuine friendship and connection are all the more valuable in the cultural wasteland they inhabit.

You can read the full review here:
https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2023/08/review-rivers-edge-reflects-gritty-millennial-malaise/

Review of Sas Milledge’s Mamo on WWAC

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I recently had the good fortune to write a review of Sas Milledge’s graphic novel Mamo for Women Write About Comics. The book came out last April, but it’s been at the back of my mind all year. Mamo is the sensitive queer critique of cottagecore that I’ve always wanted, demonstrating the appeal of “nature” and “tradition” while simultaneously arguing that these concepts must change and evolve for new generations.

Mamo is about a witch who returns to her hometown for a brief visit and gets pulled into a local mystery despite her best intentions. I started thinking about Mamo’s story this summer while trying to grow a tomato plant from Home Depot in my tiny concrete backyard. Either I was watering the plant too much, or I wasn’t watering it enough. Maybe it needed to be around other plants? Maybe it needed to be lifted farther off the ground? I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t thriving, and I kept wishing that I weren’t so clueless about growing a simple tomato plant.

Like, wouldn’t it be nice if I’d lived in the same place all my life, and I’d grown tomatoes every summer, and I knew exactly when to plant and harvest them. Wouldn’t it be nice to bake my own bread to go with the tomatoes. Wouldn’t it be nice if a kind older adult helped me. Wouldn’t it be nice if, when I went to the grocery store, I knew exactly where the yeast is, and everyone I saw in the store greeted me by name. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a backyard that wasn’t concrete. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tree by my house. Wouldn’t it be nice to live near the friends I grew up with, and be part of a community.

The truth is that I did spend a part of my childhood in a green and beautiful small town in rural Georgia where my mother’s entire extended family lives. And the truth is that I felt extremely alienated and unwelcome there, and that I couldn’t stay. My mother’s family has all the “tradition” you could ever want, and this was extremely unhealthy for me, especially as a young queer person. Even if you leave, though, a part of you is still going to miss the abstract concept of “homeland,” especially when it’s tied to all the simple pleasures most people don’t get enjoy in a city.

Mamo understands this, and it expresses these tensions beautifully. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

As a renegotiation of tradition, the cottagecore visual aesthetic of Mamo is liberating. Milledge’s bold and expressive art celebrates green spaces that exist on their own terms regardless of human relationships. The literary trope of seeking freedom from oppressive social constraints by venturing into the wilderness is as old as human storytelling, and Milledge’s colorful and immersive art invites the reader into the forest along with Jo and Orla as they attempt to find a new path between untethered freedom and rigid tradition.

You can read the full piece on Women Write About Comics here:
https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2023/08/mamo-by-sas-milledge/

As always, I’d like to express my appreciation for my editor, the amazing Kat Overland, who allowed me to write about a graphic novel that came out more than a year ago. Kat also writes about comics, and you can – and should! – follow them on Twitter (here) and on Bluesky (here). You can also follow Mamo’s creator, Sas Milledge, on Instagram (here) and on Tumblr (here). As I was reading Mamo, I realized that I used to be a huge fan of the artist’s Legend of Zelda comics (like this one), and it turns out that they still have excellent taste in fandoms.    

Speed Dating for Ghosts

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Originally released on Valentine’s Day in 2018, Speed Dating for Ghosts is a short and simple roleplaying visual novel (or rather, visual short story collection) in which you can date your choice of nine ghosts. The version currently available on Steam, on Switch, and on Itchio includes the “Go to Hell” expansion, which includes three more postgame ghosts to date and an epilogue in the form of a beach party in Hell.

You play as yourself. Presumably you are dead, and also a ghost. You have registered for a speed dating event that is, predictably, run by a ghost. At this event, you choose between three rooms, each of which contains three ghosts. You have two short conversations with each of the three ghosts. If a ghost likes you, you can go on a date with them. Thankfully, it’s not difficult to convince the ghosts to warm up to you, and you can go on a date with all of them without having to replay the initial conversations.

These “dates,” such as they are, involve helping each ghost take care of their unfinished business. Instead of romancing the ghosts, what you’re really trying to do is learn their stories. After you complete a date, you’re rewarded with more information about the ghost via a character sheet on the “Graveyard” page of the game’s main menu. Once you date the first nine ghosts, you’re given the option to visit Hell for postgame content.

The gameplay consists of choosing between dialog options and being friendly. The art is simple and stylized but manages to achieve a good balance of creepy and cute. The writing is wonderful.

For me, playing through one speed dating room + going on three dates took about 25 minutes. Technically, you can convince a ghost not to date you, but I don’t know why you’d do this. All of the dialog choices make sense, and I can’t imagine needing to use a walkthrough. The postgame content is a bit trickier, and two of the ghosts in Hell might require some extra effort to date. The third ghost in Hell is a dog, and you can pet him. I love him forever.

Aside from the ghost dog, I’m also a fan of Spooky Peter, the plague doctor ghost who’s been around for centuries and has found a vocation in frightening the living. If you agree to apprentice under him, he inducts you into one of the more arcane mysteries of the afterlife, and I appreciated the worldbuilding of his story. There are also two older ghosts (Vera and Gary) who were involved in murder mysteries, and both of their plot arcs are fantastic. One of these stories was so emotionally satisfying that it made me tear up a little, while the other thoroughly creeped me out.

Speed Dating for Ghosts is a fun collection of short stories tied together by an interesting framing device, and I enjoyed the two hours I spent with it. Based on the dry tone of its humor, I’d say that the game is aimed at a mature audience, but there’s nothing particularly grim or edgy or upsetting about it. The writing and art contain elements of horror, but they’re very mild. I didn’t know what to expect from Speed Dating for Ghosts, and I was surprised by how creative and clever it is. It’s always a pleasure to find a weird little game like this that uses the medium to craft a unique and engaging piece of storytelling.

Trinity Trigger

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Trinity Trigger, an action JRPG published by Xseed Games in April 2023, is essentially Secret of Mana with a fresh coat of paint. The story is simple. The combat is simple. The dungeons are simple. There’s a rudimentary crafting system, and it’s simple as well. I love this simplicity, which allows you to enjoy the game in the same way that you might enjoy scenery from a train window. Not everything has to be complicated, and Trinity Trigger is a wonderful title for people who play games to relax.

You control three heroes, each of whom can wield a set of weapons chosen via a ring menu, just like Secret of Mana. Some enemies are vulnerable to certain weapons, but these vulnerabilities aren’t a big deal outside of boss fights.

Unlike Secret of Mana, you don’t need to grind for weapon upgrades, which are unlocked automatically at the end of each dungeon. There are a few sidequests that involve backtracking in order to fight a slightly stronger enemy variation, but these aren’t necessary for staying ahead of the gentle difficulty curve. Trinity Trigger is slightly more complicated than I’m giving it credit for, but not by much, and it’s no trouble to figure out the various character optimization systems as you go.

If I were to offer any criticism of the game, I might point out that the AI of the characters you’re not directly controlling isn’t great, but this doesn’t really matter. The voice acting isn’t great either, but you can turn it off. There are a few short anime-style animated cutscenes, and they don’t include English subtitles if you’ve got the voice language set to Japanese. This is an unfortunate oversight, but it’s not as if the cutscenes contain important information about the story, which is largely immaterial.

This story, such as it is, involves a pair of deities enmeshed in an endless war. In order to avoid decimating the world, they’ve agreed to fight through human proxy warriors. The factions of both gods want this cycle to end. Your main viewpoint character, who has been chosen as one god’s proxy warrior, is therefore joined by two warriors from the opposite faction.

Even if they never intend to fight anyone, your party still journeys from one dungeon to the next in order to collect mystical weapons. These dungeons are actually giant weapons once wielded by the gods, and their magic spills out into the environment, causing diverse biomes to exist in close proximity. The snowy mountain biome is right next to the desert biome, for example. The game is fairly linear, so you progress from one biome to the next while wondering what climate is going to be around the next corner.

In many ways, Trinity Trigger reminds me of I Am Setsuna, a game I also enjoyed. The primary purpose of I Am Setsuna was to recapture the simplicity of the combat system of Chrono Trigger, which felt especially satisfying given how complicated and arcane JRPG combat systems had become in the 2010s. In the same way, Trinity Trigger is all about creating a frame for the basic combat loop of Secret of Mana while adding a few small quality-of-life updates.

Along with the simplicity of its combat, a significant part of what made Secret of Mana so lovely was how beautiful and green its world was. As an early Super Nintendo game, Secret of Mana didn’t have great writing, nor were the characters even remotely well-developed. In Secret of Mana, an evil empire wants to cut down a magical tree, and you must save the tree. The evil empire is evil, of course, and they must be stopped. The empire is never presented as a real threat, however. The reason you keep going in Secret of Mana, and the reason you care about the Mana Tree, is because the world is filled with gorgeous variations on the “forest” environment. There are sunlight-drenched peaceful forests and dark labyrinthine forests and lush autumn forests and sparse alpine forests and fantastic mushroom forests and glittering winter forests and forests with pink cherry blossom petals floating on the breeze.

Like Secret of Mana, the writing in Trinity Trigger is passable but not worth remarking on. Instead, the storytelling of the game is broadly conveyed through its environment. What would it mean if the natural environment stopped following natural patterns? What would it look like if lakes and rivers dried up and forests disappeared? What if natural disasters became an everyday occurrence? In Trinity Trigger, an environmental apocalypse is underway, but it’s happening very slowly. Your characters are doing their best to stop it, but that’s not really the point. Rather, what Trinity Trigger wants is for you to enjoy how the wind rustles the leaves and how the sunlight sparkles on the sand.

Basically, in Trinity Trigger, you run around colorful environments and attack colorful enemies with colorful weapons while watching various sets of numbers go up. There’s not much to say about the game save that it’s uncomplicated and fun to play, and I enjoyed the twenty hours I spent with it. I have nothing but respect and appreciation for a solid and well-made 7/10 game that knows what it’s doing and does it well, and I’m always up for saving some trees.

We Know the Devil

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We Know the Devil
https://pillowfight.itch.io/we-know-the-devil

We Know the Devil is a horror-themed visual novel about three teenagers at summer camp. Although the world of the game is close to our own, there are a few differences, one of which is that “the devil” is real. One of the kids’ duties as campers is to reinforce the magical wards protecting a forest, and your job as the player is to help them make it through the night. We Know the Devil has four endings; and, depending on how quickly you read, it takes about thirty to forty minutes to finish a run.

Since you can’t get the true ending on your first playthrough, I might recommend going into the game without consulting a guide, but only if you’re the sort of person who absolutely can’t tolerate any spoilers whatsoever. We Know the Devil functions primarily at an allegorical level, and you’ll get infinitely more out of its story if you understand what’s going on. In this post, I’m not going to spoil what happens, but I think it makes sense to accurately describe the game’s premise.  

We Know the Devil is divided into ten short chapters. For the most part, the game is entirely linear. The only element of gameplay is that the player is required to make seven choices, and these choices only affect the ending. Essentially, the player is put into the shoes of one of the three main characters and given a choice between the other two characters. The ending you get is determined by which of the three kids is left out of the pairings the most frequently. Essentially, you’re choosing who dies at the end (although they don’t actually die).

To get the true ending, you have to balance the pairings evenly. Unfortunately, you can’t do this on your first playthrough, as the game doesn’t give you the key choice that makes a perfect balance possible. The first ending you get will therefore be strange and upsetting, but it’s the unpleasantness of this ending that serves as the cipher for decoding the allegory.

A major weakness of We Know the Devil is that the setting of the game is poorly defined to an extreme degree. Unless you understand the allegory, it’s difficult to piece together what’s going on. This confusion is exacerbated by the inanity of the character dialog, a great deal of which is trite chatter. In fact, some of the writing feels like a parody of an indie comic about depressed edgy teens, and my first playthrough of the game left me cold.

Although the horror elements were intriguing, I didn’t understand the larger narrative. Why were these kids at camp if they didn’t want to be there? If they had cellphones, didn’t they have cars? Why couldn’t they just leave? Why were they refusing to communicate with each other? If “the devil” is real, why were teenagers being forced to patrol the woods at night? Were they conducting some sort of ritual? And for what purpose?

None of these questions is answered, and the first ending I got didn’t make much sense in terms of plot, character development, or narrative themes. I couldn’t figure out why people have lavished so much praise on this game since its initial release in 2015, so I googled “We Know the Devil ending explained.” That’s when the story became much more interesting.

Essentially, each of the three main viewpoint characters represents a different type of queer identity. The ways in which these characters fail to communicate with one another are representations of how young people attempt to keep themselves in the closet, and the way in which “the devil” gets one of them at the end is a representation of how a secret queer identity might manifest in an unhealthy way. The summer camp is supposed to be analogous to a Christian camp for “problem teens,” and the ritual night in the woods is an analogy for how such organizations put campers in difficult situations in order to break them emotionally, after which they can be “fixed.” If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend (this fantastic essay), which unpacks what’s going on in We Know the Devil from the perspective of someone close to the culture and experience being portrayed.  

To me, the queer identities of the characters were obvious from the start. Still, a character being gay or trans is completely normal to me here in 2023, and I know very little about Christianity in the United States. All of the allegory therefore went completely over my head. Once I picked up on what everything was supposed to represent, all of the seemingly random symbology started to make sense and fit together nicely.

Admittedly, the allegory is clever. Still, I wish the story stood better on its own, especially for players who don’t come from that particular cultural background. All that aside, I enjoyed the game’s gentle and sketchy visual portrayals of its characters, and the descriptive writing that frames their conversations is quite good and occasionally even beautiful. In addition, the ambient music that underscores the game is gorgeous and used to fantastic effect. On the whole, I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to experience the story told by We Know the Devil, but I wish I’d done myself a favor and read more about its cultural context first.

The Suicide of Rachel Foster

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The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a suspense thriller in the form of a walking sim that takes about three hours to play. The game has moderate elements of horror, and the relationship between the player-character’s father and the teenage girl he groomed is a key part of the story.

This is a difficult game to recommend, as I’m not sure its merits outweigh its flaws. These flaws aren’t necessarily related to the story, which is engaging despite its sensitive themes. Rather, The Suicide of Rachel Foster has major gameplay issues that will probably be a turn-off for anyone who isn’t already a veteran fan of walking sims. In other words, The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a very walking-simy walking sim, and I think it’s safe to say that people who aren’t interested in the premise probably won’t get a lot out of the game.

That being said, the premise is a banger: Your dad was the manager of what is essentially the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, and you get trapped in the hotel by a snowstorm while inspecting the property after your dad’s death. As you poke around mementos of the past, a terrible family secret comes to light, and it’s entirely possible that you’re not as alone in the building as you were led to believe.

The Suicide of Rachel Foster begins when the player character, Nicole, gets a letter from her late mother, who hired a lawyer to deliver the document to her on the event of her father’s death. Ten years ago, when Nicole was 16, her mother took her to Portland when she left her father and the hotel in Montana they managed together. Nicole’s father had been pursuing an affair with one of Nicole’s classmates, the eponymous Rachel Foster. Rachel became pregnant and committed suicide by jumping off a cliff in the mountains.

The Timberline Hotel struggled on for another six years but closed in 1989, and Nicole’s father continued to live there for another four years before committing suicide himself. It’s now 1993, but everything in the hotel is more or less how it was when Nicole left in 1983 – including, creepily enough, her childhood bedroom. Regardless, the elements have taken their toll on the building, and Nicole is legally required to perform an in-person inspection before she has her father’s lawyer sell the property to a hotel chain.

Thankfully, the hotel still has hot water and electricity. Nicole is connected via a very chunky cellphone to a man named Irving, who identifies himself as a FEMA agent who’s been assigned to monitor her situation. Irving cautions Nicole not to leave during the snowstorm, and he helps guide her through the hotel so that she can keep the lights on and the water running during the emergency.

Oddly enough, Irving seems a little too helpful, and maybe just a little too available. He explains that he’s been a member of the small-town community since he was a child, but perhaps he knows a bit too much about the history of her family. Nicole is suspicious of Irving at first; but, the longer she’s stuck in the hotel, the more she comes to trust him. Despite Irving’s misgivings, Nicole starts to investigate the death of Rachel Foster, and she begins to suspect that perhaps the girl didn’t commit suicide after all.

While Nicole is stuck in the hotel for nine days, the player is tasked with finding the answers to three questions. What happened to Rachel ten years ago? What does Irving know that he isn’t telling you? And something is clearly strange about the hotel – what’s going on there?

While The Suicide of Rachel Foster presents an intriguing set of intertwined mysteries, the performance of Nicole’s voice actress rubbed me the wrong way. Nicole comes off like a whisky-slinging, battle-hardened intergalactic bounty hunter, which is an odd approach to the character. Nicole is only 26 years old, and she’s something of a blank slate. She doesn’t seem to have a job, or friends, or interests, or hobbies, or even practical knowledge concerning how to maintain the hotel. To me, it didn’t feel like Nicole’s badass attitude is earned, and it grated on my nerves.

In addition, one of the main thematic questions of the game doesn’t mean anything to me. Can you still love your dead father if he abused your mother, seduced and impregnated your teenage friend, and then didn’t contact you for ten years? Like… no?? At the very least, this is a complicated issue that would have required much more heavy lifting than the game’s script was willing to do.

Thankfully, what’s going on with Irving is far more interesting, and his voice actor gives an incredible performance that made me feel way more sympathy toward his character than perhaps I should have.

In any case, the game is primarily concerned with creating an atmosphere of slowly mounting dread.

Unfortunately, Nicole walks at a glacial pace, which makes it a pain to explore the hotel. The map you’re given isn’t terribly useful when you have it, and Nicole loses it halfway through the game. The location of your objectives isn’t clear, and there’s a lot of extraneous space with no plot relevance. It’s easy to get lost, and there are no nudges to help get you back on the critical path.

Because you move so incredibly slowly, I ultimately gave up on free exploration and used a walkthrough, this one (here). There’s nothing wrong with using a walkthrough, of course, but I wish it weren’t necessary.

I should note that you can run, but this is also a pain. To run in the Nintendo Switch version of the game, you have to exert force to press down the left joystick as you move it. This is extremely awkward and uncomfortable. To put it bluntly, it’s an obvious accessibility issue that doesn’t need to exist.

Also, you’re occasionally given dialog choices that don’t make much sense. You’ll choose one thing, and then Nicole will say something else. These choices are timed for some inexplicable reason, and what you say doesn’t have any impact on the plot.

This makes it all the more confusing when you’re given a choice that does matter at the end of the game, which is whether or not to allow Nicole to commit suicide. This is a weird choice to have, to be honest, especially since there’s nothing about Nicole that indicates she’s depressed or suicidal. Again, the player doesn’t know anything about her, and nothing that happened in the past is her fault. Even if you don’t allow her to commit suicide, I don’t understand the “good” ending, which doesn’t make any logical or emotional sense.

I know this seems like a lot of criticism, but it’s worth repeating that the game isn’t that long, and its main focus is on creating a creepy narrative atmosphere to accompany its lovingly rendered spatial environment. You can probably finish the story in two and a half hours if you use a walkthrough from the beginning and don’t get stupidly lost like I did, and the gameplay issues might not bother someone more inured to the idiosyncrasies of walking sims.

I have to admit that I never really warmed up to Nicole or felt any sympathy for her sexpest father, but Irving grew on me. The intertwined stories of what happened to Rachel Foster and what’s currently going on in the hotel are extremely intriguing, as is the physical environment of the hotel itself.

I’m a huge fan of The Shining, both the Stephen King novel and the Stanley Kubrick film, and it was cool to see what the “staff only” spaces of a place like the Overlook might actually look like, from the caretaker apartments to the boiler room to the industrial kitchen freezer to the utility crawlspaces. Mercifully, there are no elevators in the Timberline Hotel, but the carpeted hallways are plenty spooky enough. There’s also a secret underground passage with a secret room. I consider myself to be a connoisseur of secret basement rooms, and this one gave me serious chills.

If you’re not sold on The Suicide of Rachel Foster but curious about where it goes with its premise, I’d recommend checking out the Wikipedia article (here), which contains a detailed plot synopsis. I think The Suicide of Rachel Foster probably would have made a better novel, but there’s also something to be said for the experience of being able to walk through the hotel while hearing every creak of the floorboards and every rattle of the pipes in the walls. If nothing else, the sound design is amazing, and the dev team clearly put a lot of love and care into creating an immersive setting.

So, in conclusion, while The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a difficult game to recommend to everyone, I personally very much enjoyed being drawn into the strange and horrible story of the Timberline Hotel.