The Letter: A Horror Visual Novel

 PC
The Letter: A Horror Visual Novel Image
Metascore
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Generally favorable reviews- based on 15 Ratings

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  • Summary: When seven people fall prey to a vicious curse, they will discover that horror rests not from the shadows lurking about, but within themselves. To what ends will one go in order to survive?

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  1. Captain_Dope
    Feb 3, 2020
    10
    The Letter is a great visual novel horror.

    PROS + Characters All seven of the playable characters are well-written, each of them having    The Letter is a great visual novel horror.

    PROS

    + Characters
    All seven of the playable characters are well-written, each of them having their strengths, flaws, quirks, and baggage. As you play their chapters you get to know and bond with them. You might find a couple of them a bit irritating, but no one is perfect. You’re probably gonna end up hating Luke at first, but as you see more of him and learn about his background, you might think he’s not a total ****

    + Replay value
    There are many choices with small or big consequences. All seven playable characters can die. This leads to many different paths and endings. You can skip all texts you have seen before. If you choose to fast forward it will stop whenever you come to a dialogue you haven’t read before. The first playthrough should take about 20 hours at average.

    + Many endings.
    There are many happy, sad, or neutral endings for individual characters and their relations with others. Some endings are outright depressing, whereas others lead to happy romances. There is also a “true ending”, but whether it’s good or not is up to you to decide.

    + Voice acting
    The voice acting usually ranges from good to great, depending on the character. There are a couple of side-characters with voices that don’t fit their appearances, but it’s no big deal.

    + Music
    The music is excellent. There are many good soundtracks for happy, scary, or sad scenes. The credits and true ending songs are amazing. You can listen to them on Youtube. You can even buy the soundtracks on Steam.

    ++Art style
    The backgrounds, item sprites, and CGs are all detailed and colorful. You can check all of these in the gallery after you’ve seen in the game. Some squeamish people may not like the gory deaths though.

    CONS

    - Story
    The story is very cliché, involving a haunted house and a vengeful ghost. It’s very similar to The Grudge. That doesn’t necessarily mean the story is bad. You should still enjoy it.
    - Character designs
    The character designs aren’t bad, but they do have a very anime-ish look on them. Though most of the characters are about 30 years old, they look to be 10 years younger. Ash looks like a Japanese male model than an experienced cop. The creepy design for the ghost however is great!

    - Filler scenes
    I’m not sure if this is a common thing with visual novels, but there are some scenes that feel like fillers, having no real purpose. The characters talk, but it leads to nothing. You could pretty much take them out and not much would change. I guess they’re meant to get to know the characters better.    … Expand
  2. gum11
    Dec 19, 2017
    10
    best interactive book i've played through. the story is great, the characters were all interesting. Great story and character development too.best interactive book i've played through. the story is great, the characters were all interesting. Great story and character development too. The voice acting was really good too.… Expand
  4. PublicNuisance
    Jul 4, 2020
    7
    The visual novel genre can be a crowded one and many games in it can have a hard time setting themselves apart from the pack. In many ways TheThe visual novel genre can be a crowded one and many games in it can have a hard time setting themselves apart from the pack. In many ways The Letter manages to do that. The game can be really creepy at times. The art is very well done. The characters are unique. The voice acting is a bit of a mixed bag. For the most part everyone does a great job but there are times when they feel like they are overacting to a situation, getting way more angry than they should over nothing. I noticed this with several characters but with Isabella the most. I wasn’t a huge fan of the character of Luke Wright but at the same time I enjoyed his humour the most as well as the humour of his German man servant Johannes who never failed to make me smile. The music is well suited to the scenes, especially the more sombre ones. The game uses QTE events to break up the reading and are usually there to escape from the spirit who pursues you. They are usually button mashing fests but there is one such QTE which was having to hit a sequence of numbers in order to get an elevator door closed in time that was a nice change of pace. If QTE’s aren’t your cup of tea there is an option to turn them off which I commend the developers for. Having more options to tailor a game to your liking is always better than less. The game has a journal system that logs various key events so you can have a nice chronological view of the games moments. This is pretty useful at times as the game has you play as various characters. This allows you to see different moments from the view of various people and get a better perspective on their backgrounds and motivations. It felt like a video game version of a Tarantino film. The only problem with it I had was that every time a new journal entry was logged if you were already on that day you had to switch to another day and then back then flip through all previous entries to see your newest one. This becomes an annoyance after a bit of time. There are also a stats page to keep track of your relationship status with each character and the one your currently playing as so you can better see the impact of your choices. There were a few times where it seemed that a choice always had a positive and negative impact for the sake of it. So when I lost points with a character over some minor offence taken from a comment when there was little need to it felt unwarranted. Overall though it was a good choice system with some great branching. There is a branching tree visible in the game if you want to see your route so far and plan accordingly but it is optional if you’d rather play in the moment and not to achieve a specific outcome. While a good option I will say the branching tree was laid out in a confusing manor and not labelled very well. I did find that the story ragged on a bit at times. I attribute this to the fact that while playing as each character gives you better insight it also makes you replay the same moments over and over which can get a tad boring. One thing I will also say is that while the story is great; and the epilogue is great; the back story is not very well fleshed out. I honestly couldn’t tell you just who the spirit was or what they wanted.

    I played The Letter on Linux. The game never crashed on me. I didn’t notice any spelling errors. There is no option to turn off subtitles. I would prefer to keep them off when a game has voice acting. It may have been due to the game not having full voice acting. A great deal of the dialogue is voiced but there are times that aren’t. The sub titles none the less do have some errors but not from spelling rather than incorrect wording. They don’t always match the dialogue being spoken. For instance one time a character says “north east” but the subtitles say “north west”. The game did open on the wrong monitor forcing me to manually move it over to my main. The game sues the Unity engine. I played version 1.1.4 of the game. Alt-Tab didn’t work for me. The game allows you to manually save whenever you want and gives you 90 save slots to use.

    Disk Space Used: 2.3GB
    VRAM Used: 400-1023MB
    CPU Usage: 0-7 %
    RAM Usage: 1.8-2.8 GB

    Overall I enjoyed my time with The Letter. It did a good job of varying up the game play with the QTE events and various character slices. It did a great job of trying different things rather than following a tried and true formula even if they didn’t always pan out. It has a fantastic atmosphere; great art; good music and a good overall story although not perfect by any stretch. I finished the game in 13 hours which felt a bit long and padded. I paid $28.99 USD for the deluxe version, the base game is $19.99 USD I feel the price is fair. If you enjoy horror themed visual novels I would at least give the demo a try.

    My System:

    AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X 8GB | Mesa 20.0.7 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 20.0.3 | Mate 1.24 | Kernel 5.7.0-3-MANJARO    … Expand
  5. Punisher1978
    May 2, 2022
    4
    Nice artwork, too much waffle. It took too long to get going, and I had lost interest by then.
  6. Bulletprccf
    Feb 9, 2018
    1
    While some of the art and the sheer amount of choices programmed in for this visual novel may be exceptional for an indie title, the game hasWhile some of the art and the sheer amount of choices programmed in for this visual novel may be exceptional for an indie title, the game has severe flaws that make me utterly disappointed with the positive reviews for it. The voice actors themselves were fairly good, but sometimes the accents for characters didn't make sense: Rebecca sounds English in the game, not Scottish as she's supposed to, and Ash sounds American despite living in the UK his entire life. Some of the "bilingual" characters randomly insert words and phrases from their native languages into their English speech -- this is NOT how real bilingual people speak. In addition, Marianne inserts Gaelic, a language that isn't even commonly spoken in Ireland (or at all). On a different note, while the artwork was phenomenal, the game didn't have a cohesive art style. The sprites, menu art, CGs, and opening theme all had very different styles. It didn't feel like a finished product, more like bits and pieces of a fanwork thrown together. Finally, while the choices and routes were somewhat impressive, the narrative was far too long and bland. Characters go on extreme tangents where nothing happens except inner monologue, telling the reader things xe already knows. Couple this with vague endings and unexplained reveals, and truthfully this game deserves closer to a 4.4, not an 8.4.… Expand

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