The Suicide of Rachel Foster

Overall, The Suicide of Rachel Foster does its best to get you in that uncomfortable gameplay horror structure it aspires to achieve, and it succeeds in engaging and pulling you into the experience. The game just falls short in the story and never really brings the actual horror you would expect to the table, which hurts the gameplay. The long journey to start the horror and the payoff by the end doesn’t match up. That’s not to say you won’t get something out of the game, at least some mystery and suspense, but your expectations of what you should get and what you want to get will never quite come to fruition.

A dark premise that, like most uncomfortable experiences, deserves to be told. A few technical issues knocked my pacing back slightly, but didn’t stop me from seeing this through.

Despite the heavy topics at its core, The Suicide of Rachel Foster in the end proves to be a bit overly melodramatic. It resembles the work of a playwriter that tried too hard to be dramatic, with overacting characters, the entire experience being a sizzle rather than a bang. But, thanks to the few moments when the tension can give you goosebumps, The Suicide of Rachel Foster is worth experiencing on a rainy afternoon, but only by the fans of the genre.

If you’re unsure whether you can handle some uncomfortable and disturbing topics, this is definitely not the game for you. If you’re looking for a creepy and dark mystery to get lost in for a couple of hours, or you’re curious who Rachel Foster is, this is worth a playthrough.

The Suicide of Rachel Foster offers up some wonderful environmental storytelling, creating palpable tension. Once everything starts to come together however, the game itself starts to fall apart. What could have been good ideas fall into thoughtless choices, and the strengths of the game as a whole are wasted on the finale. Outside of the gimmicky triggering ending, this game had the potential for something interesting.

While The Suicide of Rachel Foster has the environmental and graphical potential to be an incredibly spooky and mysterious horror game, it becomes a frustrating and uncomfortable story that never really gives a cathartic ending and therefore squanders its narrative and horror potential.

There will be people who like The Suicide of Rachel Foster because they are able to sidestep away from the whole pedophilia aspect, which is only a possibility because the game itself tries to frame it differently. I can’t tell you how much I initially wanted to like The Suicide of Rachel Foster — I played it twice and watched several let’s plays to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. But the developer really needed to handle these topics better, or at least have one character that didn’t sympathize with the sex offender. Ethical issues aside, the environments were great, but everything else fell flat. There is no recommendation here, only concern.