The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a dark tale. You play Nicole, a young woman who returns to her family’s abandoned hotel after the loss of her parents in order to fulfil her mother’s last wish: to sell it, and make amends to the relatives of Rachel Foster – a woman Nicole’s age who has been grievously wronged. A government official named Irving is your only companion as, haunted by the ghosts of your family’s past, you explore the hotel and uncover Rachel’s story.
The ascent of the first-person narrative adventure since the likes of Dear Esther and Gone Home has given gaming perhaps its best set of heuristics yet in handling weighty or character-driven narratives. From those early trailblazers through Firewatch to 2017’s splendid What Remains of Edith Finch, this is a genre that continues to prove its worth in exploring characters, developing their relationships, and discussing serious topics with appropriate depth.
The Suicide of Rachel Foster follows in their footsteps, tackling some of the most serious, even taboo themes in our culture – ones that videogames don’t often approach at all. As you’ve probably guessed from the title, Rachel committed suicide after her entanglements with Nicole’s family.
With themes of “taboo love, emotional repression, grief, and traumatic experiences,” game director Daniele Azara says the team were aware “from the very start” of one central challenge: “We want our players to reflect on these topics, since they are often shut out by society and rarely talked about, when discussion is one of the most powerful healers. Still, you don’t want to overdo it and risk offending someone.”
As Azara says, discussion is a healer, and it also helped the team achieve an honest, engaging, yet sensitive portrayal of these issues. “From pre-production all the way through development, we constantly sought advice from fans, professionals, and partners to maintain that fine balance that allowed us to approach sensitive subjects without becoming a morbid, depressing game.”
Any narrative designer will tell you that telling stories in videogames is a challenge at the best of times because of the medium’s interactive and collaborative nature. You have to shape the story to accept not only the player’s agency, but also that of your colleagues, as designers’ choices, technical limitations, and much else can ripple throughout the project. Again, communication and collaboration is key.
“From the very start, we were aware of the challenges mentioned above in telling such a deep emotional story,” Azara says. “Rather than start with a finished story and adapt it to fit a gaming format, we worked very closely with our writers to design a narrative that could work in unison with the gameplay and vice versa. Given the amount of attention dedicated to planning the gameplay and the narrative as a single entity before beginning development, we were able to smoothly implement the story through the game without running into any major obstacles.”
The environment has always been an essential consideration in this genre as exploring it to discover telltale artefacts from the past is one of the main vehicles by which story is delivered. From Gone Home’s snapshot of 1995 in US suburbia to the abruptly vacated English village in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture or the Finches’ ramshackle family house, these games have given us places redolent with life and detail. And now The Suicide of Rachel Foster gives us the Timberline Hotel.
“The replication of real-life unnerving settings within a game is key to developing an emotionally immersive environment,” Azara says. “Dim lighting, abruptly disturbed silence, loneliness, disorientation and uncertainty play an extremely important role in keeping the player on the edge of their seat without the use of traditional ‘horror’ gameplay elements like jump scares, supernatural entities, etc. It’s also interesting to note how a player’s experiences can amplify the eerie aspect of our hotel; players with strong memories of ‘The Shining’ will translate those feelings into their experience within the environment of The Suicide Of Rachel Foster.”
To achieve all these goals in environmental design and in creating a certain atmosphere, the devs chose to make their game with Unreal Engine 4. Not only did they find it easy to integrate with their workflows, but it offered an “incredible inventory of high quality features and tools. As we were aiming to produce a product of extreme visual quality, the uncompetable rendering quality of UE4 was of essence,” technical director Andrea Bechini says.
In particular, Bechini cites Unreal’s tools as helpful in overcoming “a fundamental aspect of mood – that is, lighting. The swarm agent was incredibly useful to us as it allowed us to distribute our lighting calculations across the entire team, substantially decreasing the effort needed to properly manage in-game lighting.”
After decades of iteration, Unreal has been used to make games in every genre now, but its history in first-person shooters is perhaps the most extensive and illustrious. You might think, then, that a first-person narrative sim would be pretty straightforward, but this is no shooter. This genre presents a number of particular considerations in game design, which the team had to thrash their way through.
“It was very challenging to find and implement the correct proportions and size of the hotel, especially in relation to other performance settings,” Bechini says. “We needed to create a realistic environment, where the player could identify with their surroundings in a natural way, especially given that the entire game takes place in a closed space. Furthermore we needed to make the hotel large enough and varied enough to maintain player interest; so there was a lot of architectural and proportion studies during pre-dev to make everything just right.”
The evolution of the first-person narrative adventure has been exciting to watch for anyone who wants to see games go deeper on story, character, and challenging subject matter. For any such person, it’s also reassuring to see One-O-One Games think so preparedly about the challenges and responsibilities that come with that ambition.
The Suicide of Rachel Foster is available now on Steam. Unreal Engine 4 development is now free.
In this sponsored series, we’re looking at how game developers are taking advantage of Unreal Engine 4 to create a new generation of PC games. With thanks to Epic Games and One-O-One Games.