![]() ![]() There are the same geometric carpet patterns, microcosms of the building's layout that repeat themselves down hallways whose length feels vaguely like an assault. But the decor has the same, insidious, not-quite-fleshy texture as in the Overlook Hotel, a parade of sour greens, septic pinks and sickly cream oranges you can all but smell. It's far from an exact replica - smaller and cosier, more rustic hunting lodge than jet-setter's watering hole - and the choice of a first-person view means there's none of the derangement fostered by The Shining's blend of weird angles, breathless long shots and tracking sequences. The Timberline Hotel is openly based on The Shining's mountainside retreat. If The Suicide of Rachel Foster isn't a work of outright horror, however, it does take inspiration from the best. ![]() There are no fail states, says Bellincampi, so “everyone can play the game and have a certain flow”, and while there are hints of supernatural shenanigans related to Nicole's troubled family background, you shouldn't expect jump scares or anything utterly gruesome. It's a mixture of branching dialogue and free exploration with some very light environmental puzzles, like hunting for a screwdriver or a generator switch. The three-to-four hour first-person experience that ensues takes many of its design cues from Campo Santo's Firewatch. ![]() Fortunately and just a tiny bit suspiciously, help is at hand in the form of a federal ranger named Irving, who reaches out to Nicole using the first-generation mobile phone you find hooked up in her old bedroom. On arriving, she's marooned by a blizzard, and obliged to pick through rooms charged with memories she'd rather leave undisturbed (including, presumably, the identity of the titular Rachel Foster and the circumstances of her death). Now the owner following her parents' deaths, Nicole has returned to the hotel to carry out a survey before putting it up for sale. Set in 1993, it's the story of 26-year-old Nicole Wilson, a woman who fled her family's hotel as a teen after the discovery of her father's infidelity. “The key words are very much nostalgia and mystery rather than fear or terror,” he tells me, as I play through the opening sequences. The Suicide of Rachel Foster is not, according to its lead programmer Lorenzo Bellincampi, a horror game. So far, there is nothing particularly amiss about that model, no suggestion of malice. There's a similar model in 101% and Reddoll's The Suicide of Rachel Foster, showing the Timberline Hotel's situation high in Montana's mountains, a “You Are Here” flag fluttering jauntily from its roof. But it also sums up a film in which the horror isn't really driven by grotesqueries like blood-filled elevators, but the quiet hostility of the spaces around them - the vast, silent ballrooms, corridors and stairwells that eat away at your imagination as Kubrick's queasy camerawork feeds you through them. It's an obvious visual metaphor for Jack's mounting ogreish tendencies - you can feel him itching to stretch out a thumb and squish them. He glares down at it (Nicholson's eyebrows really deserve an Oscar apiece) and the film cuts to a slow zoom from above, showing us his family wandering through the model, as innocent and unsuspecting as Pac-Man's ghosts. Midway through totemic 80s skin-crawler The Shining there's a scene where Jack Nicholson's disheveled caretaker, scouring the Overlook Hotel for the antidote to writer's block, stumbles on a scale model of the hedge maze his wife and son are exploring outside. ![]()
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