I’ve certainly had worse jobs than the one given to you in Dead Letter Dept. I’ve worked in retail. I’ve worked in I.T. I know a thing or two about cursed computers.
Right there, I connected with Dead Letter Dept, especially since I like typing. I probably would have been happy if I was just playing Data Entry: The Game. But, as it turns out, there’s more to it than the simple satisfaction of a job well done. There’s also some effective but unconventional horror.
Dead Letter Dept. (PC)
Developer: Mike Monroe, Belief Engine
Publisher: Belief Engine
Release: January 30th, 2025
MSRP: $14.99
Cursed computers aren’t necessarily a new thing. Pony Island, Home Safety Hotline, and I know that there’s an obvious one I’m forgetting. Don’t let that dissuade you. While the concept might not be the most unique, Dead Letter Dept still has a lot to offer.
You’re cast as a young person who is moving to the city by themself for the first time. You’ve not only got some new digs, you’ve got a new job. And that job is to examine undeliverable letters and transcribe the correct address if you can read it. These letters are stained and ripped, and some of them are just written by people with horrible penmanship.
But the transcription is what it literally is: busywork. It’s not really a challenge. The letters aren’t small puzzles that you need to decipher. They’re mostly a storytelling tool. Proofreading addresses start giving way to stranger things, like bitter or tragic postcards and odd, alarming messages hidden betwixt. I mean, obviously something is going on underneath. Obviously. This is a horror game.
Before each work day, you start off in your horrible apartment. Your bed sucks, you haven’t finished unpacking, and there’s a locked exterior door that the landlord says leads to the fire exit, but that seems suspect. There isn’t much to do in the apartment, so you leave and take a walk to work. It’s truncated a bit, but the walk still does a good job of building the hopeless atmosphere.
As you go through your workdays, things just get stranger and stranger. At two or three hours for a playthrough, things escalate rather quickly, but the pace feels just right. It doesn’t play coy for very long. A couple days in, and the jumpscares start happening. And when I say “jumpscares,” I don’t mean that monsters start grabbing your ass at the water cooler, I just mean that sudden noises will start occurring offscreen or the computer will glitch out suddenly. It is what it is, but Dead Letter Dept capitalizes on it quite well by gluing you to the computer screen. If a sound seems to be coming from behind you, you can’t just turn your head to look at it, you just have to go on working, and working while spooky stuff goes on around you is one of my favorite styles of gameplay.
And while jumpscares may be cheap, that’s not all Dead Letter Dept has. It also has immaculate environmental storytelling. Its atmosphere is heightened by a disturbing lo-fi fuzz filter, careful use of lighting, and a very selective and surreal color palette. It leans heavily into cool colors that you wouldn’t normally associate with specific environments. Interior hallways, for example, are almost entirely a sickly green color.
It’s hard to fully communicate it in writing, but the visual and audio aesthetic of Dead Letter Dept allows it to drive above the legal limit. At its core, its gameplay is simple; limited, even. It’s clearly the work of mostly one person. However, it nails its atmosphere so perfectly that you can’t see the seams. It’s better executed than most big-budget productions without losing the fingerprints of its creator.
And while a single run is only 2-3 hours, that’s not the whole story. It’s made for multiple playthroughs, thankfully not using a roguelite format. Instead, there are just multiple endings. It’s not simply based on decisions made throughout the game, either. Instead, it’s just up to you to figure out how to derail things in different ways, and that’s a rather interesting wrinkle. There are hints on what you need to do, but nothing overt, leaving you fighting for your life in different ways… But, you know, within the confines of data entry.
The downside is that, while there are some random elements, there perhaps aren’t quite enough letters to keep things fresh on each playthrough. I guess there are only so many ways you can obfuscate an address, but – and I can’t believe I’m complaining about this – this job could use a smidge more variety.
Mike Monroe and Belief Engine really know how to get a lot of mileage out of a simple idea. It would, perhaps, be accurate to say that Dead Letter Dept is better than the sum of its parts, but, truly, I think that fails to illustrate just how great its parts are. The simple joy of data entry is wrapped in a soft tortilla of a well-communicated atmosphere and a well-executed aesthetic. Through its medium, it finds the horror in mundanity and uncertainty. It’s a message worth receiving.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
