So Dead Letter Dept. got recommended to me by Steam’s store page.

(sigh)

This is half of what demos are for.

It started off with a nicely atmospheric prologue, as I looked at a still image of a dimly lit doorway and composed a letter to someone, didn’t matter who, apparently – the available salutations included “Love” and “Hey, asshole” – and suddenly I was in a hallway. No, it wasn’t another still, I could move around with WASD, so I walked along the short, straight hallway to the only interactable object, the doorway at the far end…

(I assume I’m not wearing night vision goggles.)

…and found an office. It looked dark and dingy. It also looked incredibly large for a temp data-entry clerk, but whatever, still atmospheric. I interacted with the computer and got into the game proper:

First problem: the gameplay is not terribly interesting. It’s described in-game as “typing up the junk that computers can’t auto-read,” which consisted mostly of mailing addresses. some of which are randomly generated filler.

Here, look:

Those addresses led me to the next problem: it was unaccountably irksome how the devs, who are from the US (“a stone’s throw away from Seattle“), were showing me four-digit ZIP codes. That was a minor nitpick, though, and in hindsight might even have been intentional; I pressed on.

Then there was a still image with no text. I tried typing in a couple of random responses – including asking the game if it wanted me to describe the picture – before realizing that it was a postcard and maybe the text was on the other side…

…which led me to the next problem, which is that this game is designed not just for keyboard, but a keyboard with old-school ancillary function keys, which my laptop doesn’t have. So before I could flip the postcard over, I had to go on a side trip to the options menu to rebind some keys.¹

At least I could rebind the keys; otherwise my playthrough would have ended right there.

And then there was this bullshit:

The store page informed me that I could “type in various prompts, and attempt to decipher damaged images,” whatever that means. And someone has helpfully transcribed every non-random thing in the game already, which is how I found out that “big ink blot” was supposed to be Poplar Grove, IL 61065.²

I skimmed through a fair bit of that transcription, actually, because I was already pretty sure I wouldn’t be playing this again, and the promised “secrets” and “multiple endings” range from underwhelming to cliches to nothingburgers.

But it’s still a bit atmospheric, with a horror flavor. The ambient sounds are occasionally slightly unsettling; there’s an occasional visual glitch; and a few of the messages are mildly creepy.

That’s the entire demo, though.³

I could have gotten the same effect by searching “horror ambience” on YouTube and then picking up a book. Or, if I wanted typing practice to go with my horror ambience, I could retype literally anything I have lying around the house. Or write a blog post.

If you’re despearte for that ambience, though, and you have literally nothing available to read or retype despite having Internet access, you might get more out of this game than I did. At time of writing, it’s on sale for 10% off its regular price…

…of $14.99. I could buy the first four games on my Steam wishlist right now for that, and odds are at least one of them would give me a decent time. I’m going to go ahead and not recommend Dead Letter Dept.

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1. Those Post-It notes showing the controls did change to reflect the new key bindings, something that not all games’ developers have thought of.

2. 61065 is Poplar Grove’s ZIP code, and it’s just barely legible if you zoom in far enough, but I don’t remember if the in-game zoom was far enough. And even if it was, was I supposed to (1) assume that a game that showed me four-digit ZIP codes had this one right and (2) alt-tab out of the game to Google it?

3. Another Steam user wrote an achievements guide that mentions some other stuff in the paid version, like going “home” to an apartment between shifts and then hallucinating a bottomless pit between you and the computer when you go back to work. I’m not sure how much that adds, though it does explain why the game has movement controls at all.