Dead Letter Dept. delivered on Steam

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Demo also available for newly released creepy psychological data entry horror game on Windows and Linux

Sitting at a computer all day inputting data may not sound like a whole lot of fun, but it's not supposed to be particularly SCARY either. Well, you can throw away both notions entirely in Dead Letter Dept., the newly released horror adventure by Belief Engine that will leave you anxiously dreading what each new entry might bring. 

You've just arrived in the big city, leaving your past behind under circumstances – good, bad or ugly – that you'll decide for yourself at the start of the game. To make ends meet until something better comes along, you've managed to land yourself a temp job doing data entry. Your impressive-sounding title is officially "Data Conversion Operator," but all that really means is "a warm body who types up all the junk computers still can't read." Every day, seemingly alone in a creepy, nondescript building, you dutifully transcribe addresses and other selected passages from mail that couldn't be delivered, whether "due to bad handwriting or other reasons unknown." It's not always easy to read, as mail can be "mangled and twisted," having "travelled from place to place with nowhere else to go" until a scan of it arrived on your terminal. But it's all pretty routine until "oddities in the mail start to emerge, and cracks begin to appear." At times it even seems like "it's talking to you directly through the screen..."

Inspired by one of the developers' own experiences working for the US Postal Service (hopefully the data entry part and not the horror part), Dead Letter Dept. is not an adventure game in the traditional sense. Described as an "atmospheric typing horror game," there's no overt narrative but rather a "strange and voyeuristic" form of storytelling uncovered as you go long. Nor is there much roaming around once you've made your way to your office, mainly just sitting, scrutinizing, and typing while the hairs on the back of your neck begin increasingly standing up. One piece of mail after another is downloaded to your computer, and you must type out as much of it as is legible, with a zoom feature providing an oft-needed closer look and an "auto-suggest" function activating only after giving it enough data (and even then, very much open to error). An ability to type is practically a requirement, though it's unclear what penalty, if any, exists for wrong submissions. 

No matter how accurate your efforts, the moody music and disquietingly staticky graphics will occasionally be punctuated by "bizarre and sometimes intense" experiences with no apparent explanation. Is something haunting you? Are the isolation and darkness causing you to slowly lose your mind? Is there even a single, definite answer to these questions? Perhaps not, as the "storylines discovered in the mail change every playthrough," leading to one of multiple possible endings, ensuring that no two playthroughs are the same. That gives the game a high degree of replayability, with a single playthrough expected to take about two hours to complete.

Dead Letter Dept. is available today for Windows and Linux, but no need to type in an address as you can simply click our link to find it on Steam. If tempted but not sure you have the nerve or the typing skills needed to succeed, a playable demo is available as well, offering a decent-sized taste of what to expect. 

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