You wake up in a dungeon cell. Standing from the threadbare cot, you see a message written on the wall. It’s tutorial instructions. You pick up the only interactable item and turn it over. There’s a key taped to the back. You escape your locked cell only to learn that the dungeon contains multiple doors that all require different keys. Finally, another door opens, and you enter the scariest room of all: your place of work! It’s a perfectly normal post office with a ringing phone. You answer the phone, and your boss Liv gives you the lowdown on the job. She sends you to the window to talk to an amnesiac man named Amon, and we’re off to the races.
Letter Lost is an uncanny job simulator game with deep mysteries buried just beneath the surface. You are the sole employee at the Kharnym Isle post office, stamping, sorting, and delivering mail. Over the course of a day, you do all those daily chores and talk to people who come to the window. Do what they ask to make progress in storylines. Your boss checks in on you frequently and is quick to give a course correction if you make even the teeniest, tiniest mistake—it’s so nice how hands-on she is! Work ends promptly at 8pm. The company is very strict about work-life balance, so at the end of your shift you are mysteriously and forcibly hover-lifted out of the post office, flown up the stairs, and deposited in your apartment—what service!
Over the course of a week, you make progress on the storylines by moving forward dialog as you send packages and letters hither and thither, but everything (except a few permanent inventory items) resets at the end of the week. You will once again wake up in a dungeon cell, meet Liv over the phone, and greet Amon at the window. But you do remember. You know where to look for a certain object or what dialog options will get a certain NPC to open up to you. This week, you’ll be ready, and you’ll pull these threads a little farther until you get to the bottom of the storyline.
Here’s the thing about this game. It can be a normal job simulator if you want it to be. If you want to simply stamp letters and send packages, you certainly can. As you do the mundane tasks, you rack up money for cosmetics (you can change the wallpaper, the lighting, or the stamp handles) or assistive tools (mail slots spit out letters that are incorrectly sorted, or the shipping truck has more spaces available for the tetris-style package organization). It’s incredibly chill and pleasant to turn on some classical music on the in-game gramophone and get lost in a cozy task like sorting letters. However, this game belongs in the same genre as Blue Prince or Outer Wilds. Eventually, you’ll want to break out of your comfort zone. Maybe you hear a strange story on the news radio. Maybe you open a letter and its contents intrigue you. Once you pull at one thread, you start wondering about the rest, too. Grab a notebook and get scribbling!
I have to provide a strange disclaimer for this review. I was unable to finish this game because of one perfect storm in my personal life after another. I started to joke with the editor that this game has haunted me. I made it into the thick of Act II (out of three) when incredible happenstances caused me to lose all of my progress, something which I absolutely do not blame the developers for, and it’s entirely an issue between my hardware and the Steam cloud. Due to these unusual circumstances, I was not able to finish the game as I’d have liked to, not only for the review but also because I was really enjoying the game! I did complete two storylines and was hard at work on teasing out the threads of several others. It’s been almost two months since the game launched, and my life immediately got haunted by it in multiple senses of the word, so I am finally writing what I can. So here’s the upshot:
This entire game is a closed-room mystery on a time loop. A huge amount of information is available to you from day one, but you don’t know what it means or how to use it until you gain other knowledge. I play lots of puzzle and mystery games, and this one had me scrawling across a notebook and gasping out loud just as often as Outer Wilds and Blue Prince did when I played those. The game rewards poking at every item and peeking around every corner. Listen to every record you find, look closely at every painting you see, open all the drawers and doors you can, and, even if Liv yells at you for it, maybe open a few packages and letters and see what comes out.
Aesthetics and vibe: the graphics are simplified and realistic. They reminded me of Strange Antiquities, though fully 3D. The music is an orchestral score perfect for an eerie mystery, moving from sustained high strings to plunky harpsichord to soporific piano. You can also find records hidden in the post office, and some are real orchestral recordings of classical music.
Accessibility: The overall game settings are pretty basic: full screen, graphics quality, brightness, resolution, and VSync for the visuals; and sliders for global, music, and sound effects for the sound. Subtitles are always on, which is especially helpful with the radio shows that have that old-timey crackle to them. Save anytime—when you restart, you’ll spawn right in the middle of the post office at the exact time, to the minute, that you saved. You can spend your in-game money on accessibility tools like mail slots that spit out misfiled letters or fixing the truck pallets to make the package loading minigame easier.
There’s even an assistant monster pet who will do the letter stamping work for you, freeing you up to focus on the other gameplay (though he comes with a disclaimer that he won’t do a particularly good job, so you won’t make as much money if you use him). Time is the most important and limited resource in the game, and as of Act II I had not found a way to slow it down, which might be irksome for some players. However, there is no real time limit to any part of the game. If you miss an opportunity on one day, you can try again the next day or the following week. To keep track of time, just keep an eye on the big clock in the post office or apartment, or on the pocket watch you find in the middle of Act I.
Because I could not finish the game, this game is not scored. I do give it a general “recommend.”
