I would rate this game lower because of some of the art looking a little crusty and the abrupt ending that the average player is likely to get, as well as how poorly explained many of the plot points are, but I'm a big fan of the branching story tree and the fact that it has full voice acting, which is an insane ask for any VN, let alone a fairly niche unknown name like this.

it's creepy and mysterious at times, but does start to buckle under the weight of its story and the choices of its seven(!!!) protagonists towards the end

uno N-bomb @ 3:17

I've decided that the only accurate way to explain how abysmal the prose of this game can get is writing a review that mimicks the average text within the game. I'll do my best.

Sooo...
This is technically a Horror Visual Novel. And you guys know how those thingies work, right? C'mon, people, it's in the title!
It's Visual, so you got pictures in it. It's a Novel, so you got lots of words in it. (Not that I mind, you see! I like reading! I'm such a normal and relatable but also regularly adorkable girl!) But the Horror part? That's supposed to be its selling point, right? So, do I think they actually managed it? (I sigh, then unleash 10 more lines of rhetorical questions and useless anecdotes that neither flesh out nor make any of what I'm saying more interesting.)
Unfortunately basically nothing interesting happened in the two hours I could handle playing this before the urge to smash my head against a wall got too strong for it to be safe to keep playing. (I roll my eyes. Sheeesh, this got dark.) Unless you consider the silly jumpscares in the five minutes of actual Horror sandwiched between crappy banter something. (I shrug.)
Oh well, I suppose I'm giving it an extra star for its production value. Part of me can respect this game's ambition. The other part? Well... The other part is very concerned about the abnormally large amount of poor, repetitive writing all those poor, repetitive voice actors were subjected to. Yikes. I hope they got hazard pay!

That's it. There's only so much "I rolled my eyes", "I shrugged" and other YA blathering a woman past her thirties can take. This game feels like one of those 1000k words fanfiction that got this big not because a lot of things happen but because the author doesn't know shit about editing and just puts anything that comes to their mind in it. It's unbearable, genuinely one of the worst VNs I've ever played. If your game is this reliant on writing, for fuck's sake, hone your goddamn craft.

tw: racism

i have 168/172 achievements and i'm considering going back and just finishing it off but we'll see. overall this game has really good art and voice acting that enhances the horror, as well as good character writing but it obviously has some aspects that could've been done better like the pace. i think racist characters like luke are allowed to be written, but it's really jarring to have us try to sympathize with him by the end, after he's literally called the only Black playable character the n word. i am thankful that the store page has it as a trigger warning, at the very least, and that luke is meant to be a villain. it was just odd for us to play as him and the game to give him a tragic backstory that tried to explain his racism.

this is one of the only visual novels that has tackled this many branching narrative paths which is why it will be forever memorable to me.

I had fun playing this one. I don't have a lot of visual novel experience in the horror genre. This VN is heavy on the novel side. The first run took me roughly 14 hours. This is one of the few games I have ever played that felt like my choices really mattered. You could make a small decision that later on a different character will comment on it.

The art is fantastic. The animations are awesome and make it less static. (Minus the weird boob physics...come on.) Special kudos to all the voice actors. Everyone's voice and speech felt like that character.

Overall, it's high quality VN. I did have an issue with crashing on certain paths. It would break when I tried to instantly skip the dialogue, but I could pass that by the classic "fast-forward" skip. That was unfortunate since I had to sit and wait. One reason I have so much time logged into this game.

The downside to all those different choices: there are MANY, MANY different paths and nodes in the flowchart. My time is so bloated because I convinced myself to get every achievement. There are achievements to unlock every choice in all seven chapters. It was so much work. But it did make the first handful of runs unique.

The game does need hints or text on the in-game's flowchart to help you remember what to unlock. There's seven characters and many different combos you can't possibly remember. I did feel a bit disappointed in the true ending. There's a ton of content throughout the game and I was hoping for more focus on the horror part.

I finished this game in just under 18 hours over 4 days, and I'm still not sure why.

I have had what could be called a very strange week with The Letter. After finishing the excellent AI: The Somnium Files, I was searching around for another visual novel with English voice acting. The Letter appeared over and over in my searches as one of the better ones, and so I decided to give it a roll.

The Letter is intended to be campy horror, which I think it does well, but it also strains itself relying on just one monster, a bloodthirsty ghost girl, for 18 straight hours. I saw so much of her that I stopped getting frightened about 3 hours in. Also, this visual novel is so, so much longer than it needs to be. After a while, I realized that all of the introspection text between dialogue was kind of useless. It's basically just people internally thinking the same thought in 15 different ways and then voicing it aloud. If there was a "skip to dialogue" button this would be getting a lot higher rating.

During the course of the story you'll play from the perspective of each of the seven main characters, one after another, reliving some events from different points of view and then moving the story forward a day. You make 5-6 decisions per character that determine how the story plays out, and to its credit your decisions make a huge impact. I can't even imagine how much writing went into this, because testing out different decisions with different save files led me to extremely different stories (not just endings). The voice acting was pretty good, for the most part, although there was a lot of discrepancy between nationalities and accents (Ash was born and raised in the UK and Isabella was from the Philippines, yet both had American accents).

I liked some parts of it a lot, despite the mediocre YA horror prose and numerous grammatical errors. The characters were sort of endearing; Zach, Isabella and Hannah especially I commiserated with. Luke is cheating on his wife, impregnating random women, emotionally abusive, racist, and narcissistic to a degree I've barely ever seen. He is actually the last character you play as, so I was expecting to be disappointed when they tried to redeem him. Well, they didn't. Getting inside his mind reveals that he's an even bigger piece of trash than I had suspected.

Watching the relationship meters change depending on my decisions and seeing the ramifications of that quickly after is more than I can say for most choice-based games of this nature. The save system and "skip to unread text" button allow for players to easily experiment with different decisions without wasting too much time.

I guess my biggest complaints are that the story wasn't very well-written, I wasn't a huge fan of the art style, and I truly hated many of the characters I had to play as (such as Luke and Marianne). Yet, despite this, I was hooked. I found myself staying up till 3 AM on Friday and Saturday night with it.

It was like... comfort food. It didn't require me to think, nor did it require me to mechanically do anything. I think I really needed that this week. I'm not sure that I recommend it, of even if it's good, but I had a good time with these dumb kids and I only got one of them killed. I think today, I am content to take that small victory as I leave this strange story behind me.

As a fan of both horror and visual novels, it was only a matter of time before I crossed paths with The Letter. Personally, I feel that the horror VN space is surprisingly quite limited, at least in terms of worthwhile entries. So… what about The Letter? Is it worth reading, or best left unopened?

The Letter was the debut title of Yangyang Mobile, which hit Steam’s servers in 2017. It was also released for multiple Sony and Microsoft consoles, as well as the Nintendo Switch, and the Google Play Store.

To call The Letter massive is a disservice, super massive would be more apt. Structurally it is similar to what the company Super Massive Games tends to put into works like Until Dawn or The Quarry, except that The Letter is a Visual Novel. If you are unfamiliar with what I am getting at here, it is VERY choice heavy with multiple endings. There are choices that you make which will determine the fate of the seven characters that you individually control and what happens to those characters determines how frequently they’ll appear in the story thereafter.

Under the hood, there are a lot of mechanics at play at all times. One of the most interesting ones, which goes towards determining the ending each character gets, is the relationship meter. Generally speaking, every chosen dialogue choice impacts one character’s relationship with another, or in a couple of cases, multiple. This might sound daunting, and it is, but it’s made a lot easier by the fact that the relationship bar between all characters is always readily accessible for viewing on the UI. Plus, you get a notification every time it updates and it shows a plus or minus next to the character to indicate how the bar has shifted in case you don’t remember where it was before. Every single character has their own relationship meters with other characters and they all start at different places on their respective relationship meters in regards to what the other characters meant to them at the start of the game. The relationship meter also carries over between chapters (for example, if Rebecca is low on Isabella’s meter; then when you go to play Rebecca, Isabella will be low on her meter).

There is also a mechanic called The Branching Tree, which is similar to, but not quite, a flowchart. It shows you all the choices that you’ve made and those that are to come. It is a very handy tool for subsequent playthroughs when you are trying to figure out how to access unseen content. In addition to seeing how potential choices might branch, it will also show a butterfly mark to indicate that the branch you are on - and/or options you have available to you - are the result of a previous choice.

Unfortunately, because of how the Branching Tree works and the overall structuring of the story, you can’t just select a route and load in from there (which you would be able to with a flowchart). You also cannot skip to next choice because of this setup. That’s rough for subsequent playthroughs, but Yangyang Mobile did their best to meet in the middle here by putting in a skip unread text button. It quickly fast forwards through text the reader has already read and then stops fast forwarding once new text - or some variant of already read text - is reached. Thankfully the fast forward speed is incredibly quick.

There’s also a journal tab on the UI available for viewing. The journal contains sketches of relevant characters/events next to a short summary of what has occurred from an in-game character perspective. This makes it easier to track what is going on due to how you’ll take on the role of a new character for each chapter (which means you’ll go back and forth on the timeline) and the fact that the game takes place over a period of 14 days.

Storywise The Letter manages to be horror at its most simple and captivating. It follows 7 people as their lives are irreparably changed - and threatened – by the discovery of a letter. The story is broken up into seven chapters and an epilogue. Each chapter chronicles a character’s point of view of the events that follow. For the sake of spoilers, I won’t be divulging more than that, but I do want to talk vaguely about the writing. Writing wise, it isn’t nonstop horror and bad things, there are some moments of calm and slice of life in between. I’m bringing this up because I’ve seen some people state that they felt the story dragged on because of those segments, however I firmly believe that the segments are necessary and found them well done.

To clarify, there was never a COMPLETE break from the horrific events that took place in the story, those things were always on all the characters’ minds. But, by having some measure of normalcy in between, the day to day as it were, it gives a chance for us to get to know the characters and their personalities better. If it was constant balls to the wall horror, we wouldn’t be getting some of those tender moments, which in turn causes the horror ones to hit harder. Having the normal in there is what makes things more scary.

Getting to see the characters be normal made me feel for them when bad things happened to them. Bringing me to the next point of review, I felt that the characterization in this game was REALLY well done. There was one character that went against nearly every bit of my moral fiber and I still felt for and liked them by the end of the story. That is some strong writing. None of the characters were perfect and all had their own unique flaws/demons. The only thing I want to complain about is that both Rebecca and Isabella seemed to have a habit of needlessly overreacting in ways that caused fights. This got exhausting at times, but I suppose that proves my point in how the characters all have their realistic flaws.

The art direction is spectacular! I adored the character designs. Truly, all of the character designs manage to stand out while not clashing with each other. While I don’t have much of an eye for art, I couldn’t help noticing how seamless the art style was at switching from a calm and clear look to downright terrifying.



I think the biggest criticism I can level at the game is that - after talking with a friend who lives in the United Kingdom - the way that The Letter represents the UK is almost wholly inaccurate. A lot of the buildings are very American in their architecture for example. While some English terminology is used, it’s mixed with American terminology as well, making it inconsistent. In my friend’s case, she believed the story to be set in the United States, despite it mentioning places in England, until a way into the game because of how badly this pulled her out of the experience. That said, I - as someone who lives in the United States and is ignorant of the United Kingdom in general - didn’t see anything amiss except for the architecture not matching.

There are some nice bells and whistles present that I wasn’t expecting such as animation. Sometimes there will be things like birds flying by in the background on occasion, or the curtains will be blowing in the breeze. There’s also English voice acting, which I really enjoyed (but can be disabled if it isn’t your cuppa tea).

Quick Time Events are present, but you can skip them and auto-win them by pressing the TAB key if you so wish.

Doubling back to what I said about the game being super massive in size… It took me around 17 hours to finish my first playthrough and an additional 7 hours to get through my second while fast forwarding through all previously read text. As of writing my review, I’m 28 hours in and have achieved 4 different endings and am sitting at 117 achievements out of 172.

Overall, I’d say that if I were to give it a grade it’d be with the letter ‘A’. I found the game to be impressive, never mind the fact that it was also the studio’s first release! It was clearly made by a passionate development team/studio and I can’t wait to check out more from them!

TL;DR: A unique gem and an even rarer backed kickstarter success story. The Letter has a ton of choices and directions that the story goes because of them. It’s highly replayable and well worth doing to see those other directions. Despite being set in the UK it is at least somewhat inaccurate to the setting, and while that is unfortunate, it makes up for it with the passion, sweat, and tears (hopefully not blood) poured into it by Yangyang Mobile. If you are unsure about buying it at full price, you can normally pick it up on sale for around $6; an outright steal in my opinion!

Really ambitious horror story with lots of moving parts and things to balance. Really sympathetic and endearing characters in the first half as they struggle with the world around them.

Didn't super love the second batch of characters you play as, from the overbearing mom friend who gets mad that her crush is nice to her neighbor, to the cop, to the racist. Makes it a much harder sell, especially when those bits are so much longer as all the choices and consequences start to pile up. Nonetheless, I enjoyed dropping a lot of hours into it.