This game marked the end of my 12-game October horrorthon (I wrote about all of them on this site). And even though it wasn’t exactly the one I enjoyed the most, it was certainly the one I least saw coming. After reading the general consensus on this game once I was done with my playthrough, I realised this would likely be an unpopular opinion. But here goes anyway.

The presentation, tone and story in this game conspired to hit me like a ton of bricks, especially in how creeped out the whole thing made me feel. It was as if Firewatch decided to have a baby in the Overlook Hotel and set it loose to chase me. And this really is very much what you would call a 'walking simulator’ in the vein of Firewatch, so much so that I wonder how much inspiration they took from it due to the similarities (type of character interaction, progression structure, isolated setting, etc). Because of this, this won't be a game for everyone as there's an obvious lack of literal gameplay, though you get to not only interact with your environment but also make use of a couple tools - like a windup torch and a high capacity mic - that greatly enhance your experience. The premiss is simple: you inherit some real estate and, amidst personal drama, need to travel there to inspect it and oversee its sale. What isn’t simple however, or at least simple to pull off, is the way the game manages to make you feel unsettled and unsafe, even when you know the very nature of the game means nothing bad is likely to happen to you as you play.

What stood out to me the most was that this title threads the line between reality, the metaphysical and the supernatural extremely well, often leaving you guessing what exactly is going on. As you start your journey, combing through all sorts of scientific and esoteric books scattered around the hotel, you clearly begin having the impression that something doesn't feel right. The initial buildup is handled beautifully, like a slow-burning psychological horror film where nothing is obviously wrong, yet you can feel something coming. This unsettling tone permeates the vast majority of the experience, carried in big part by a masterful, haunting use of sound and setting that literally made the hairs at the back of my neck stand up a couple times. If you do play this, you owe it to yourself to do so under optimal conditions (i.e. at night, in the dark, on your own, with headphones), because in The Suicide of Rachel Foster, you are a co-author of your own experience, meaning your enjoyment will be directly tied to how much you allow your mind to wander.

The story is unexpected in several ways, and it’s also a heavy one. This game deals with several dark themes, and it does so controversially when it comes to a couple of them. Going through some of those moments, some people might feel quite uncomfortable, outraged even, and the game pushes you into directions where you might end up hating certain characters, or even the devs themselves due to how they wrote those moments in. At the very least, conflicting feelings towards certain characters are almost a guaranteed outcome for most people who play this, and something I feel is important to have in a game of this nature, even if it may not necessarily feel pleasant. There are a few odd dialogue moments here and there where you're able to glimpse a lack of writing polish, but this is nevertheless an accomplished story with solid voice acting and a sense of unease that invades your senses. With all that said, however, I do wish they had leaned more heavily into exploring the interaction between physics and the possibilities it presents for the nature of reality and consciousness.

There have been few games over the past couple years that made me want to talk about them after playing them as much as The Suicide of Rachel Foster did. It was almost as if I needed to get something out of my chest by sharing the mystery I had just unraveled, and how I felt as I went about unravelling it. On the whole, this definitely won’t be a game for everyone, on several levels - mechanically, thematically, narratively. But it's a short 4 hour-long experience that some might truly appreciate in a couple of ways. To me, more than the story, this was an exercise in atmosphere building, a surprisingly good example of how to instil dread by suggestion, simply through subtle, yet clever stimuli that I wish more games knew how to balance effectively. 8.5/10