The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a problematic game for several reasons. It’s a game that feels like it loses its focus multiple times and yet struggles to deal with the very real and serious issues at its core.

While the game is a typical “Walking Simulator” or exploration game it wants to tackle a large and sensitive issue like many of its contemporaries. In this case, the wheel of tragedies seems to have landed on inappropriate relationships between adults and children.

In this case, the main character’s father seems to be infatuated with a sixteen-year-old. The problem is instead of tackling and examining the issue at the core of the game, The Suicide of Rachel Foster seems to leave this relationship unexplored and heavily ambiguous, only allowing an unreliable narrator to call it love, but unable to even say that they had anything other than an infatuation.

So rather than exploring the serious topic at the core of its story, The Suicide of Rachel Foster instead decides to spend most of its runtime with horror tropes that don’t connect to the main story in a meaningful way. There’s supposed to be a spooky ghost in the hotel you find yourself and much of your time is exploring the hotel unrelated to the main topic.

But just as the player is about to uncover the ghost, The Suicide of Rachel Foster seems to drop the thread and move back to the main story leaving the player with an unsatisfying conclusion.

Much of The Suicide of Rachel Foster seems to be about setting up major elements of what the player assumes the game is being about and then quickly moving on to another topic potentially never to return.

Ultimately, The Suicide of Rachel Foster is an unsatisfying game that tries to tell stories it’s unable or unwilling to tackle, and then concludes with what it seems to think will be a deep finale, but without telling the full story up to that point, it is a lacking experience.

This could have been an interesting and disturbing look at a serious topic, but instead, The Suicide of Rachel Foster ends up being more disappointing than anything.

I give this the arbitrary value of

4/10

As much as I wanted to do a full review, much of my deeper criticism is heavy spoilers, but I believe I’ve covered many of my issues with the game. It’s just not a story that is told in a proper way to say what the developer was trying to say.

If you want to see an earlier look at this topic or the other humble bundle games that are available this month, you can check it out here.