Your first glimpse of Letter Lost is pretty menacing. You’re in a dungeon, and the ceiling is engraved with bronze spikes, with claw marks etched on walls – all hints of a place seemingly built to ensnare a dangerous, desperate beast. It’s this warped atmosphere that contrasts sharply with what takes place after. Upon pushing open a door and stepping out of the dungeon, you find yourself in a very different place altogether: a rustic, even if unremarkable post office. The decor is particularly sylvan with its timber floorboards, ornate ceilings, and carved wooden columns, and there are even little nooks for sorting letters and processing packages. Most of all is the constant pitter-pattering of rain, a soothing white noise that cajoles you into a comforting routine of being a postmaster. The dungeon, too, has disappeared from where you came from; behind the door is now a small custodian closet.
The post office appears comforting, but the abrupt change in mood still seems like whiplash, and you’ll be constantly searching for a sign that this mellow facade will crumble at any time. That’s because this cosiness in Letter Lost is merely a mirage. I spend a good few minutes just sorting out mail and chatting with visitors, while constantly expecting some phantom to materialise behind me. I pick up the ropes of managing the post office from my manager Liz, a suspiciously cheery voice from the other end of a daily phone call. I carefully examine every book on the shelves in between my mail-sorting duties, in hopes of discovering some clues into my strange predicament. Every interaction in this place is tinged with a sinister note, and for good reason too; at the end of my shift everyday, an overwhelming presence will possess my very being, forcing me to drop whatever task I was doing, and dragging me into my bedroom for a company-mandated downtime. I’m not allowed to leave this place, yet I’m also not granted the permission to work through the night.
A closer look around the office, however, will reveal breadcrumbs to deciphering its mystifying world. Letter Lost is ostensibly about being managing a post office in a mysterious isle called Kharnym, and at the start you’ll sort letters and packages, while arranging for deliveries to be made across the island. Letters and packages can be delivered to three districts – Wistvale, Doloth Hill and Dragshallow Bay – and these needed to be processed with the appropriate stamp and sent to the right destination. In addition, parcels need to be scanned and weighed. Truck deliveries have to be arranged, with additional packages placed in the right order on broken crates to ensure minimal damage; it’s a process akin to a game of tetris. Customers, too, will visit the post office with their own letters and packages for delivery. Finally, you’ll get paid for every letters and packages you’ve processed. You can spend your earnings on sprucing up the post office with more decoration, and even upgrades to help you become more efficient: swifter arm movements, inspirational posters that see letters flying into your to-do pile a little faster, and even a reptilian critter who will stamp a few letters for you even before your day begins. The whole affair feels like snug, fulfilling busywork, and it’s easy to immerse yourself in this routine if you prefer. There’s even a radio station you can tune into, a comforting white noise that will really ease you into the mood for processing letters.
But there are oddities to this routine. Your customers come to you largely dazed and confused, with some even wondering aloud why they are sending letters in the first place. Liz is oddly evasive about answering your questions about the post office and the island, instead pretending that this is merely a regular job you’ve signed up for. The weather is perpetually foggy and downcast. You’ll meet the same faces again, many of whom appearing as if this is the first time they’re seeing you. And at the end of every week, you’ll be given a performance review that summarises your efforts, with you being sent back to the dungeon. You’re seemingly stuck in a time loop, Groundhog Day-style. The reality is that Letter Lost is an escape room game with puzzles tucked into every dark corner, and the goal is to leave its impenetrable walls.
Part of Letter Lost’s appeal is in these very puzzles, with the prize of solving them being a narrative tidbit that unravels the enigma of Kharnym. Fortunately, the puzzles themselves are mostly decipherable without being too convoluted (the rubber duck puzzle in The Longest Journey comes to mind), although if you can’t get past key puzzles, you risk not progressing beyond a certain stage. That said, Letter Lost does encourage experimentation, although the build I was reviewing Letter Lost on was extremely buggy. At one point, I was so stuck that I began trashing the post office, tearing open mails and ripping packages apart with reckless abandon. This led to incredibly ghastly results that I was delighted to chance upon, but I was also sent careening out of the map due to the sheer amount of items swimming about the room (a bug that I eventually figured wasn’t supposed to happen, given that I would often end up being stuck in a corner that required me to load an older save). A hint system would have been useful to minimise frustration, but barring that you’ll most likely be reaching out for an online guide.
Despite these issues, Letter Lost becomes all the more beguiling as you go through multiple loops. Take your superviser Liz; for all her apathy and even outright antagonism, she becomes an indelible yet comforting presence, with this amplified by the very solitary experience of being the lone postmaster in the office (a situation that seems to carry parallels to Firewatch’s Henry and Delilah, the latter being a colleague and manager you never get to meet in person). Solving certain puzzles can also lead to curious outcomes; for instance, you can mail a job application to a recruitment agency, with Liz suggesting an junior post officer for you to manage — a choice hire which utterly reflects Liz’s sardonic humor. You may also take to other characters, from an omnipotent creep called Indric, to the bedeviled, confused visitor Amon, who usually visits the post office asking if he needs to sort out any mail himself. Then there’s the biggest riddle at the centre of Letter Lost, a conundrum that will lodge itself at the back of your head: what really is going on? Why can’t I leave the office? Why is everyone always so lost all the time?
Between solving its myriad puzzles and getting into the banal routine of mail sorting, Letter Lost reinvigorates the puzzle genre through excellent mood-setting, delicately calibrating the atmosphere between cosy and horror, mundanity and tension. Even as you’re faced with a mountain of mail to sort and an avalanche of parcels to deliver, these efforts are merely illusionary. A new week comes, and your letters are gone. Someone has cleared them all, and the same faces beckon daily to inquiry about mailing letters, as if the very notion is a new, revolutionary concept.
Liz hints at an unknowable presence that’s keeping you trapped in this office. Cults and sacrificises take place beyond the building that you are not privy to, but only hear about on the radio and within the inane mutterings of your visitors. Letter Lost bends and folds the very fabric of reality and time in its universe so dexterously, that you’ll forget that you have sunk dozens of real-life hours into this world, too.
