Dead Letter Dept is a bizarre and utterly unsettling experience.
It’s not often that I find myself at a loss as to how to review a game, but Dead Letter Dept has me unsure of where exactly to begin. I can easily say that it has one of the most uncomfortable atmospheres that I’ve experienced in a game in some time, but how to define the game is very tricky. The closest comparison I could think of was the equally bonkers Calendula, which described itself as a game that wouldn’t let you play it. Regardless, I think it’s something that horror fans should certainly take a look at, with one proviso, which I’ll get into.
In Dead Letter Dept, you play as a self-named character who has moved away from home to the big city and is now working for a company that handtypes text from letters and envelopes that can’t be written by computers. Maybe that’s because the handwriting is atrocious, or perhaps for…other reasons. Either way, you go to work each day, get sent through images of letters that seemingly can’t be read, and you need to type in the correct addresses or other text.
So here’s the proviso I mentioned. You are going to spend a lot of time in this game retyping what’s on the screen, and on occasion that’s going to be quite a bit of text. Sometimes it’s as simple as copying an address, and in those cases Dead Letter Dept even includes an autocomplete option once you’ve got enough of the detail in. Others you’ll be typing out whole paragraphs that do tie into the story, but can also be a slog to get through. If you can put up with that, you’ll enjoy this considerably more than those who can’t.
Anyway, over the course of the game, the things you are sent to copy become more unhinged, including correspondences between family members, text from historical and medical textbooks, and even warnings sent directly to you. You’ll get strange images that appear and then vanish when you look on the other side of a letter. The environment around you, both in your apartment and at work will begin to change, with an ever encroaching sense of dread until you reach the end which is so utterly bananas I was dumbstruck and had to let things settle in my mind for a day or two before even thinking about starting this review.
There’s more though, and I can’t go too deeply into this without spoiling things, but suffice to say that there are multiple endings. Once you figure out what you can do with the letters that you receive, then things can take some substantially different turns that go a long way to revealing the true plot, as well as the plots relating to other characters you may or may not spot during your job. It wasn’t until my second playthrough that I actually felt like I started to understand things, and it was very satisfying when things started to come together.
The visuals and sound go a long way to making Dead Letter Dept as effective as it is. The soundscape is fantastic, beginning calm enough, with the sound of you walking to and from work alongside the tapping of keys when you’re at your computer. As things develop though, the world sounds far more threatening. Your apartment block has screeches and scratching sounds that weren’t there before, whilst work makes you listen to screams and roars around you with you completely unable to look around. Play this with headphones and you’ll need to take breaks to recover.
When it comes to the visuals, a similar approach is used, with the look of the world becoming darker and more dangerous. Things that you were sure were there before have disappeared, whilst the view from your window (was there always a window there?) shows something different from one day to the next. This does become a little frustrating later on where your vision sometimes becomes so obscured that it’s very hard to see anything. You can work around this by setting the visual details to Low, but that shouldn’t really be necessary. By the end game, this was a bit of a problem as I really couldn’t find my way around the final area without spending the whole time hugging walls.
That issue and a one-off clipping bug that forced a save and restart of the day were the only things that were really a problem here though. Everything else was quite compelling, and with a play time of around two hours to complete a run it’s not a huge issue. This is a thoroughly unique experience that is worth the attention of gamers who feel they’ve seen pretty much everything. I very much doubt you’ve played something like Dead Letter Dept.
Dead Letter Dept is available now on PC.
