I mostly bought the game because the plot drew me in. It's about a woman, Nicole, whose father had an affair with a school-friend of hers over a decade ago. That school-friend, Rachel Foster, went on to commit suicide, prompting Nicole's mother to leave her father. Nicole never saw her father again. The game begins shortly after her father's death, with Nicole heading to the hotel her family used to live in, in order to evaluate it for sale. Trapped there by a storm, she ends up learning more about her family's mysteries. See, I liked that description. It sounded intriguing. I like mysteries, and there are many great mysteries enhanced by a supernatural element or with creepiness, which I hoped this would be.
The first thing I really didn't like was the gameplay. This game is a "walking simulator", basically a game where the primary method of gameplay is to walk around, occasionally interacting with things in order to unlock more plot. I don't so much object to that, I've liked other games in that style like The Path. No, what I object to is that it's all in first person, and that made me very dizzy. It did add to the creepiness, in the sense that you had to make your character walk forward and look at whatever you didn't want to look at. That was a huge strength of the Fatal Frame/Project Zero series, but, what that series did differently is that it was only in first person when you were looking through a camera, not 100% of the time. Also, that game didn't make me nauseous. Turning the quality of the graphics down did help, but that was partly because the game tended to jolt more on higher settings on my PC. I did like the fact that you could look around and pick things up while talking on the phone, that felt very natural, and I liked the way that unlocking the next part of the plot also felt like Nicole very naturally wandering around the hotel
I pushed through the initial sickness because I was intrigued by the story, so that wasn't a dealbreaker for me. However, the story didn't live up to its promise. While it deals with many themes, it didn't treat any of them with the depth or respect they deserved. Take, for example, the suicide of Rachel Foster. Firstly, we never, ever hear from Rachel. Not in a diary or a letter, not in ghostly whispers, not even in Nicole's memory. She's a completely empty mcguffin. The game tries to tease us with the idea that she might still be alive or otherwise still around, despite the fact that they already revealed there was an autopsy, so we know that wasn't the case. We know she "had an affair" with a man in his forties and that she then killed herself, but literally just those bare facts, nothing about how she felt, how that affected her relationship with Nicole (since Nicole appears to have despised her the whole time anyway), just...nothing. There's also the "affair" thing. The game knows how young 16 is. Nicole is repeatedly told she was "just a kid" at the same age, the game's advertising makes use of Rachel's retainer, the few items we're shown which we're told belonged to Rachel are clearly those of a child...and yet, the game never addresses the disturbing elephant in the room, that this child ended up having a sexual relationship with a man in his forties who was supposed to be tutoring her. How? We're told she was "mature for her age" - which, ew, gross - but nothing else. It's like she and Nicole's father just happened to get hit by a truck or something, rather than that one of them - I'm guessing, you know, the grown-ass adult in the equation - had agency in making this happen. Nicole never deals with her feelings about this either. How about, I don't know, when looking through her father's stuff she finds something that triggers her to express her disgust or other traumatic feelings over her father having sex with a child? Or anything about reconciling her feelings towards her loving father with her feelings toward this child molestor? And yes, I know that where the game is set the age of consent is 16, it's 16 here in the UK too, that doesn't make it less gross. All we get is that Nicole hates Rachel - which makes sense, since this event ending up destroying her family, and it's probably easier, for a child, to blame someone who she hated anyway rather than her loving parents - and since she appears to have always hated Rachel, that's just not that interesting. Nicole also appears to be jealous of Rachel, which is quite interesting. I mean, her dad literally chose this other sixteen-year-old child over his family, that has to bring up some complicated feelings. But, again, we don't really get anything about this.
The thing I love about horror, as a genre, is its empathy. Horror stories don't work if you can't empathise with the characters or put yourself in their shoes. Horror stories are also used to explore our fears and worries, often with a big supernatural twist, but still in a recognisable form. Take Get Out, for example. Sure, it turns it up to 11, but it's fundamentally about white people using black bodies for their own purposes - as slaves, as cheap labour, etc - while ignoring black people, as in, their emotions and feelings, their right to a decent life or bodily autonomy or just to live their lives without constant aggression (micro or otherwise) because of their skin tone. The movie uses a tight narrative, specific characters, and some supernatural elements to tell us a story that delivers a bigger idea that is fundamentally true and important, even if the specific story is fictitious. That's why one of the most terrifying moments is that last scene, when [spoiler] a police car pulls up. We all know what happens to black men when the police show up, even though we know Chris is innocent. In every other horror movie, we assume that everything turns out fine once the villain is dead and the police show up, but we all know that that isn't what tends to happen for men who look like Chris [End Spoiler] The Haunting of Hill House (netflix series as opposed to book or movies) does something very similar, but with the idea of parents as flawed people who might, even with the best of intentions, harm their children, and children as people who cannot be protected from the world however much that terrifies parents, much like The Others. Stories like Rosemary's Baby or We Need to Talk about Kevin are about the fears of having children, not knowing who they'll be, zombie stories are about plagues, and there are many, many stories about the fear of losing control of your body and/or not knowing what you're capable of, like [Spoilers] The Others, but also Fight Club or anything which uses dissociative identity disorder as a plot point [End Spoilers]. The Suicide of Rachel Foster could have done something like that but it just...doesn't. It nails the creepy atmosphere - I spent the whole game waiting for a jump scare that didn't come - but it completely fails to do anything else with its material. It's literally all just there to creep you out, which is, like, the least important part of horror, to me.
