I’ve written before that I’m a sick freak who loves typing games. While many people consider typing to be ‘work’, I love it. I love hitting my keys hard and irritating my co-workers. More than once, while writing a regular email, I’ve been asked, “Are you fighting with someone online?” I type with an intensity best described as “annoying”, but I also believe that I think on the fly better with my hands typing than I do with my mouth moving. I’m also a massive horror game fan – which, believe it or not, is a genre that has a couple typing games. So you can understand why I was excited by Dead Letter Dept. – a game that promised both scares and using my keyboard extensively. Oh, I know that’s a narrow sub-genre that might not appeal to everyone, but trust me when I say this game is Silent Hill meets Severance. It’s amazing.
I’m torn between wanting players to be completely surprised by the game and needing to hit a word count that makes my editor feel comfortable paying me. But let me do my best. In Dead Letter Dept., you’re an anonymous person in a semi-anonymous big city. I say ‘semi-anonymous’ because a lot of the little details change from playthrough to playthrough. More on that in a second because I’m too excited and I’m explaining everything out of order. This anonymous person – that is, you – seems to have moved to the big city after a major life event that we only get a few hints at. The game opens with you writing a letter and choosing from a list what you want to say, ranging from cheerful to absolutely desperate. It’s a creepy way to set the table.
How Dead Letter Dept. Works
Anyway, the majority of the game is you working your job as a Data Conversion Operator. That’s a fancy way of saying that you’re supposed to look at letters rejected by the post office and see if you can determine the correct address. In the game itself, you spend most of the time sitting in front of a computer monitor. As mail appears, you type up the highlighted parts you can read – sometimes requiring a lot of effort. Sometimes this is just a loose envelope with a normal address. Sometimes it’s a whole lot of weird stuff written all over the envelope. Since this is a horror game, the more you play, the more weird stuff pops up. The only thing I wasn’t sure about being intentional is that all these letters come from American cities, but a lot of them seem to love using the metric system and spelling words the British way. Then again, having to read it written as “litre” is horror enough. Could honestly be a toss up. Also, sorry to my editor, who is British.
As you play the game, you get a greater and greater sense that your personal life is falling apart. You ride the subway home from work every night and comment on the ways in which you’re suffering. You beg your friend for a new job that doesn’t seem to ever come. Even walking to work becomes more belabored and strange and, hell, even difficult at times. Your apartment is oppressive. Your apartment hallways are oppressive. And your office is super oppressive. Everything is suffocating. Even if things were normal your life would be on the brink of ruin, so you really need this job to go well.
As with many horror games, the more you advance, the worse things feel. But your character needs the money to survive. That’s your reason for being here. Not that you actually receive virtual bucks for completing a day. In fact, it feels like no matter how much or how hard you work, you fall more and more behind on bills. This is all played out through text and letters, but the game drowns you in that sense of urgency. You’re not a super cop with a shotgun. You’re not even a regular guy with a wooden plank stuck in a town. You’re an employee at a faceless company in a faceless office and everything is falling apart. It’s something a lot of us have been through in our lives and will probably go through six or seven more times before we’re done.
Dead Letter Dept. Is Best When You Don’t Know What’s Happening
I think that’s where the Silent Hill meets Severance vibe comes in. If you’ve played Silent Hill, you understand a crappy world deteriorating around a character who may or may not have done something to deserve it. Your apartment building and work start gross and only get squishier and creepier from there. If you’ve seen Severance, you understand a confusing, oppressive workplace in which characters focus on projects with no clear meaning. Typing up the addresses on normal letters feels almost pointless – especially when they’re absolutely clear. Other times you just have to type in the text from a vacation postcard. You never really know why. But it’s your job, so you might as well keep doing it. Oh, hey, the monitor just showed something weird! Ah, well. You really need that paycheck!
One of the best parts of Dead Letters Dept. are the little stories hidden within the mail. While your life crumbles around you, you get glimpses of other people’s problems too. Some of these are complete arcs that kind of take you on a bit of a journey. Some of these are summaries of horrible things that actually happened, such as the Byford Dolphin incident. Also, you definitely do not want to look up the Byford Dolphin incident. Some of the other pieces are fragments, more similar to bits of linked ephemera you find in a regular horror game. In my first run, there was a very large amount of letters addressed to a woman I found out was missing. What happened to her? I dunno! I gotta play the game again and see what else pops up.
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This isn’t nearly the first horror game to involve a job going sideways. But there’s something about the work in Dead Letter Dept. that just feels so brutal and soul-crushing. It’s a data entry job where you rarely know how you’re doing or why typing out an entire letter about a bird would help the postal service. There’s something familiar to it, even as it gets strange and weird and bad. It’s a dead end gig taken to just pay the rent. Maybe it’s because one of my first jobs was literally data entry for a company that processed subscriptions for magazines. Actually, it’s definitely because of that. It reminds me of doing the same task over and over again as my eyes glaze over and I wonder what I’m doing with my life.
The other nice thing is that this game is designed to be played multiple times. The even nicer thing is that this isn’t a 50-hour game requiring you to unlock New Game Plus to find new material. It’s about two hours long each run and switches up things a little bit each time. Starting over doesn’t feel like a pain, it feels like watching a movie again with different scenes. There are also multiple endings, not that I’m entirely sure how or why I’m getting them.
The Dead Letter Dept. feels like it was specifically designed for me (outside of “litre”, ugh). It’s a crunchy, oppressive, short horror game in which you have to type a lot. Perfect. Exactly what I need. The Venn Diagram of me and the premise is a circle. It also follows in the tradition of great horror games like Mouthwashing that move fast and scare you to death without making you dedicate two weeks of effort. Look, if you ever wanted to find out what it’s like to have a day job in Silent Hill, this is for you. If you wanted your mind broken by going to the severed floor, this is for you. It ain’t the coziest job game, but what actual job is cozy anyway?
Survival Horror
Horror
Adventure
Action
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
87/100
- Released
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October 8, 2024
- Genres
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