Letter Lost Review – Lick It, Seal It, Stamp It, Post It

Simple, repetitive gameplay can often be the best setting for a horror game; repeating the same tasks over and over again with one eye on the clock creates the perfect environment for letting your guard down for scares, as seen in DarkStone Digital’s The Mortuary Assistant.

FlatNine Games’ Letter Lost is a mystery puzzle game where we wake up in a dungeon connected to a post office on the mysterious Kharnym Isle, with no way to escape. The phone rings, and on the other line is Liv, who is there to guide and supervise us during our new role. Our cheerful new mentor doesn’t seem to listen to our pleas to let us go, and the customers who visit the post office to drop off their mail don’t seem to be all there either, with many not even knowing who they are or why they’re at the post office to begin with, others are just downright strange. While it doesn’t fully dive into horror, Letter Lost is immensely creepy through its NPC interactions, daunting soundtrack, and the slightest noise around you as you focus on your repetitive, menial tasks.

Our day-to-day life becomes stamping and posting letters and parcels to their designated region. Each region has a specific stamp to use and, as we progress, we are given varying rules to follow; on certain days, mail addressed to a certain district may need to be put in the shredder, returned to the sender, or even… placed under our pillow? Parcels also need to be loaded onto the delivery truck, which is battered and missing panels in the truck bed. We must position parcels to both fit in the truck, but also ensure that fragile parcels aren’t touching the broken sections of the panelling, volatile parcels aren’t touching any other packages, and sometimes we’ll be told that parcels addressed to certain districts can’t be touching either – adding greater challenge in making sure we get all of our parcels onto the delivery truck before the week ends.

We have a limited time per day to complete all of our tasks before we are involuntarily whisked away to our room for our “mandatory rest time”, the door locked behind us. A letter is shoved under the door with our wages from the day – we are paid via a rate for each letter and parcel that we have posted. These wages can be spent on upgrades for the post room, both cosmetic and functional – some even contribute to our puzzle solving. The only problem with this is that, while I was occasionally enticed to save up for certain items in the catalogue, there’s really no solid penalty for not posting mail for the day. In fact, I did nothing for an entire week just to see what would happen, and besides being put in the ‘penance chamber’ for a week, which just skips time forward again, it’s hardly a punishment fitting enough to make me cautious about how much time I’m spending exploring the office and not doing my job.

Customers will also come up to the service window to drop off their parcels and letters, or they come with specific requests – one lady wants us to give a parcel to a “secret admirer”, another wants you to help find her missing daughter by mailing flyers to random addresses, others may ask you to act against your moral duties as a postal worker, such as a lady who wants us to open other people’s parcels to search for her missing heirloom. There are twelve side quests in total to complete, all of them are interesting, and I had a lot of fun with the trial-and-error aspect of them to find alternative outcomes.

This “try it and find out” gameplay extends to exploring the post office itself. Some mysteries are more obvious than others, such as the large safe in the storage room, some require you to have been just messing around with the environment to uncover, and others require a specific order of events to occur before they will be unveiled. The exploration aspect of Letter Lost is a part of the job simulator genre that I’ve seen previously attempted, such as in Julien Eveillé’s Threshold, but it hasn’t felt fully utilised and certainly didn’t have much impact over the core gameplay loop. In Letter Lost, exploration is how you uncover the wider story and progress events. If you don’t take the time to comb over every nook and cranny of your prison and test your boundaries, then you will be doomed to stamp and post for hours on end – this is a fantastic way of showing the player that submission and obedience means that they will be stuck forever in the loop.

At the end of each week, the timeline seems to reset as customers forget that they have seen you before and any ongoing side quests are restarted. This puts a time crunch on getting certain puzzles completed before you have to try again. Any side quests already completed won’t be reset during the new loop, meaning you are stuck with your choices until you restart the game again.

While you work, you can listen to various stations on the radio, including a news station, which is a great method of painting a picture of this strange island that we are unable to see for ourselves when confined to the post office. Sometimes, the radio stations will also reveal clues for side quests or the main story, as does the guide you are given on the island, which features a list of local businesses and their contact details – maybe try giving them a ring and see what happens! I do wish that the radio station had some variation when events progress, as it was strange when, during the later stages of the game, NPCs would comment on how the world has changed, but the news is still telling the same stories as it was during the first week.

Unfortunately, I did encounter several bugs during my playthrough, while these are currently being patched, I did come across enough that I would encourage players to pick Letter Lost up at a later date if it is of interest. While it is listed as playable on Steam Deck, it’s far from optimized, and I would advise against playing it on that console at this time. Menu options don’t highlight properly, which led to me accidentally erasing a save and having to start over. One day randomly finished early at one point, and during another I was locked in the bathroom because I had been in there when the clock started chiming to signal the end of the day. And overall, movement is incredibly awkward and sluggish on controller. PC felt much better to play on, albeit I continued to find bugs, including lighting not working correctly, movement sensitivity shooting up and down randomly, the news station disappearing when I bought the gramophone, and then the gramophone also stopped working.

Due to the different outcomes to side quests and the main story, Letter Lost is clearly a game intended to be played multiple times. I did this involuntarily after losing my save data the first time around due to cloud saving issues when switching between Steam Deck and PC, and again when I accidentally erased my progress. While this did give me the chance to try out new options with the side quests, it also highlighted the main hindrance to replayability, which is the repetitiveness of the NPCs’ conversations. These already tend to drag if you fail a side quest during one loop and need to give it another go during another, to then have to repeat these conversations during multiple playthroughs makes me incredibly reluctant to restart it again. There definitely needs to be some form of ‘skip conversation’ option as, by round three, I was able to memorise what they were going to say next and was clicking through the conversations like a zombie.

Letter Lost is an excellent mystery puzzle game which fully utilises its environment to offer an immersive experience which you can keep digging into well after the credits have rolled. In fact, we are over a week post-release now, and the global achievements show that there’s still much that players are yet to uncover. However, it is still in need of some polish, to the extent that I wouldn’t recommend picking it up right now until it has been patched some more, especially if you are planning to pick it up on Steam Deck. That said, I certainly recommend it to anyone looking for a new job simulator to tuck into with a mystery puzzle twist.

Jess reviewed Letter Lost on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.