Psychological safety in the workplace? You won't find it in Dead Letter Dept.
Writing can be an excruciating act. Crafting a review means painstakingly ensuring that each word I write is judiciously chosen. That all my thoughts are unique, interesting, and worthwhile. Each keystroke matters, and getting one thing wrong could nullify my intention or hurt a creative I admire. It's horrifying.
But even with that constant swirling anxiety surrounding my day-to-day writing, no typing I've ever done in my 15-year writing career has peaked my heart rate the way Belief Engine's Dead Letter Dept. did.
​Just the Facts |
Developer: Belief Engine |
Publisher: Belief Engine |
​Platform(s): PC |
​Price: $14.99 |
Release Date: January 30, 2025 |
Review key provided by developer. |
Born out of a story told between Belief Engine co-founders Mike Monroe and Scott McKie about a strange data entry job the latter had, Dead Letter Dept. showcases the horror of the mundane brilliantly. Its premise is simple, its presentation is light, and its scares are effective. Not unlike 2024's Clickolding and fellow corporate horror darling Home Safety Hotline, Dead Letter Dept. might be one of those indies that punches above its weight and lingers in our minds the longest.
Dead Letter Dept.'s scenario is a deeply relatable one. You move to a new town to leave some hometown baggage behind, end up in a shitty apartment because it's all you can afford, and start a job that you can immediately tell will drain you, metaphorically and maybe literally...
There's a Mad Libs-esque intro that lets you set up your character's background while writing a letter home, setting the scene quickly before letting you loose into the day-to-day cycle of trudging your way to work, working your shift, and getting back home to reflect on the day. Your job? Working with a company that helps correct the post office's Optical Character Recognition AI by correcting and interpreting text on letters that the AI is unable to. Scribbled names, smudged addresses, or damaged letters are saved by you and your human eyes and reinterpreted for the strange company you work for.
It starts simple. Dimly lit hallways on the way to work and awkward train rides where you spiral in your daily worries. Bad handwriting makes up most of the work you've got to clean up for the AI. But quickly, your routine is disrupted.
First, it's the same name and address showing up on several letters. Then, it's strangely grotesque fables from Greek myth. And before long, letters appear that speak directly to you. "GO HOME." "STOP." "YOU ARE NOT SAFE."
The escalation is perfectly paced for what amounts to 1-2 hour playthroughs, and when paired with what's constantly happening just outside of the computer monitor, the fear constantly creeps. Shadows materialize in your periphery, sounds that you can't quite place brush your shoulders, and you start to think that the eerie things sneaking onto these letters might be lingering in the shadows of your room.
Dead Letter Dept. has a ton of sneaky stories to tell. As you process these documents, you start to piece together deeper conspiracies. Stories unfold about the lives of the people whose letters end up in your inbox. You'll have to do some mental stretching to stitch things together, and the stories are more ancillary to the pervading sense of dread... but what's there is interesting enough to keep you pushing forward. In my first playthrough, I grabbed what felt to be the most expected ending, but there are more secrets to uncover in future runs, so you deep-diving lore hounds will be happy.
By the end, these things coalesce into an explosion of tension that has you typing like your actual life depends on it.
Each day starts the same. You wake up. You navigate your commute to work, pushing through the pixelated noise of the shadows that obscure your vision in first person. And you get to your strange office in the middle of nowhere to begin typing. Most of the game's action is exactly that: typing out whatever is highlighted on your monitor. You can zoom in on each document, flip it, and use a database of addresses to auto-fill once you've got enough of the name in.
Most of the time, there are no obvious pressures. If you get something wrong, it'll get sent to the end of the queue and brought back eventually for you to try and get right once you clear out the rest of the day's work. There are no conspicuous timers, and you aren't entirely sure how precise you're required to be... but it's a job, after all, so there's a sense that you're being judged and graded in some capacity behind the scenes. There's a constant feeling that you need to get in and out as soon as humanly possible — something undefined that makes the simple act of typing stressful.
Eventually, there are interesting little typing puzzles that emerge, asking you to type certain things in specific orders. There are then obvious external pressures that make those previously indistinct worries very clear. And the documents get even harder and harder to parse. By the end, these things coalesce into an explosion of tension that has you typing like your actual life depends on it.
If you allow yourself to get emotionally and mentally invested in this world, games that see you fighting off literal monsters don't even approach the peaks and valleys of stress that Dead Letter Dept. achieves with its clock in-clock out shifts of terror.
With its simple setup and typing-based gameplay system, it's hard to poke many holes in this micro horror experience. For starters, it's a game that requires your buy-in to get the most out of it. You get what you put in, and it can be easy to break the mystique and focus on the mundanity. Put on the headphones, turn off the lights, and sink into your chair for this one.
For a game full of mysteries and multiple endings, it's hard to see how far you can push against its systems and discover new things. Playthroughs feel fairly linear, and with how limited your actual play experience is, it's hard to uncover its greater mysteries. I'm more than satisfied with what I got out of my one ending, but I wish the era of modern indie horror mysteries was a little more accessible.
But outside of that, the team at Belief Engine have a gem on their hands here.
They cultivate tension unlike any other, doing the horror thing I appreciate the most by relying on the things you don't see to scare you. Their audio design does a stealthy amount of work here, as you're left to imagine what could be crunching in the background or what's shuffling behind the desk. They use the mundane and familiar to get you thinking about our society, about the workplace, and about human connection — and they do it without overstaying their welcome. If that's not the holy grail for indie horror, I don't know what is.
Dead Letter Dept. is an indisputable hit for the indie horror scene, and it succeeds by trying something new. By turning the familiar frightening, Belief Engine has a game that I'd recommend to anyone.
Not everyone can handle the rigorous inventory management of a survival horror game. Not everyone can stomach the jump scares that the genre usually employs.
... But everyone types.
Video Games Are Good and Dead Letter Dept. is . . . GREAT. (8.5/10)
+ typing made versatile, the real horror lives in your imagination, sound design does a lot of the sneaky heavy lifting
- requires a bit of a buy-in to get fully invested in, typing is all you've got gameplay-wise, uncovering its many secrets requires some detective work
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