The Suicide of Rachel Foster – Impressions

Ten years ago, the teenager Nicole left the family hotel with her mother after discovering the father having an affair with a her own age girl, Rachel, who eventually committed suicide. She was pregnant. Now that both her parents are dead, Nicole wants to fulfill the last mother’s will to sell the hotel and refund the girl’s relatives, so she comes back with the family’s legal to check the decaying structure. When the weather gets worse she finds herself stuck inside the large mountain lodge and finds support in Irving, a young FEMA agent using one of the first radio telephone ever built. With his help, Nicole starts to investigate a story which hides a mystery far deeper than what people in the valley thought, a story of love and death, where melancholy and nostalgia melt into a thrilling ghost tale.

The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a mystery thriller adventure game, very much in the same style as games like Gone Home or Firewatch especially. I have always enjoyed these games when they tell a good story, have an engaging environment, and good voice acting. Luckily The Suicide of Rachel Foster checks all of those boxes for me.

Graphically the game looks and runs pretty solid for an indie game, I ran into no lag, issues or bugs in my entire run through of the game. There is a VERY noticeable long loading time to get into the game, but once you are there it all runs seamlessly with very short load times in between days in this game. Voice acting is solid, there are few voices and no one else to interact with other than Irving on the radio. This aspect reminded me alot of Firewatch which also was enjoyable but I liked this story better.

The hotel is pretty large and it is easy to get lost and lose perspective as to where you are, which I think was a deliberate style choice, but it would have been nice to have a marker on the map to show where we were currently during some periods. There are many nooks and crannys to explore as well as hidden passageways and things to look at. Once of my personal favorite touches was the “Shining”-esque rug throughout the lodge.

Now at first glance I thought this would be a horror game, and it definitely is not. There are portions and environments that creeped me out, had me on edge and feeling uncomfortable but that is all part of the narrative and done extremely well.

I won’t give anything else away but if you are a fan of a good “walking sim” then I found the story and setting of the Suicide of Rachel Foster to be a fantastic time.