This Weekend I Played: The Letter

This post is only a “first impression” sort of review as “This Weekend I Played…” is a recurring series on my blog where I share my first impression of the games I’m starting currently. My opinion about this game might change as I play it more and I might or might not at some point publish a full review on it.

So, this weekend I played The Letter, a horror Visual Novel you can get on Steam. The Letter was successfully funded on kickstarter and released in 2017 and is a creation of Yangyang Mobile - a small indie company all the way from Philippines. To be honest, after all those scandals in the Otoge community with crowdfunded projects, I didn’t thought much about crowdfunded project, but this one definitely changed my opinion on them and I might invest in projects I will be interested in in the future, especially if it’s this company.

I will be honest - I haven’t heard about it at all. But I started my visual novel/otoge journey in 2018, so I guess I’m not that surprised. I found it randomly browsing Visual Novel tag on steam and I’m glad I did, because so far so good.

The Letters tells the story of seven people connected to each other by very unfortunate circumstance - a vicious curse. In this visual novel you can influence a lot. And by a lot, I mean - your choices matter right from the beginning - the story tailors itself to the relationships you develop or ruin and goes as far to even changing and modifying itself when you choose to kill off one or more characters, so to fully play this game to the very end I can imagine is pretty long. The Branching Tree included in the menu helps you keep track on it initially, but as the story develops it of course becomes more and more convoluted, which makes it a bit hard to read and quite long to load - the feature itself is a great concept, but in practice it just didn’t worked out perfect.

The game itself has a great atmosphere - the animated avatars of characters and interactive backgrounds look and feel amazing - especially on the scary bits, which did scared hibijibies out of me to the point of taking a break and I’m not too squeamish, so be prepared for that if you decide to pick it up. It does exactly what horror genre should do - induces fear. The music is also really great in The Letter and it adds additional depth to the whole experience. It did put me on edge a lot.

The only complaint I had was the voice acting - some VAs done a fantastic job, some and I mean a particular one not so much. I won’t name and shame - play it and see for yourself, maybe it’s just me as I do live in UK and have a bit of the pet peeve about fake posh English accent. Overall it did break my experience a little bit, but all in all the actual writing is so fantastic that I didn’t even mind after a while.

I really liked the character design, especially Ash’s (I mean… come on… detective… you know what I think about 2d detectives), Zach’s and Marianne. But the design of the spooks was just breathtaking - I mean, yes in the fearsome kind of way, but it was such a nod to j-horror classics like The Grudge and The Ring. The only complaint here was the design of Rebecca - she looked great, but I kept calling her Sakura, lol. I guess it just my brain making association to Naruto.

Another thing I really liked about this game was the journal. I’m not going to lie with the timeline and 7 different characters and 7 different perspectives, I did got lost sometimes and what was really handy was the feature of journal. It not only helped me to keep track of the timeline, but also was a great visual aid. I thought it was so nice to add a little personalised picture to accompany the journal note that was kept short and sweet - so different to most of the games with the similar feature. On another rate - the profiles section of the journal was nice, but I’d rather see some of the facts about the characters in the story. Also, worn mentioning - the backlog is pretty comfortable to read too.

About other features - the one thing I really like in the VNs I play is lots of save slots - which there were, so that’s another plus. Also, you can always keep the eye on the effects of your choices as you make them thanks to the relationships feature you can access anytime, which is super useful when you are trying to get the result or ending you want.

The writing is actually really great - I found the story a bit cliched, but I haven’t played through the entire game yet, mind you, so I will hold my horses on that. I really liked the fact that you can choose who ends up with who and it changes the story in a major way, which is a very interesting concept. I loved the dynamics the characters had with each other especially Isabella-Ash-Zach (that was just really heartwarming) and Ash-Isabella (I mean… it was my OTP, bye). All the characters had depth to them and as much as I didn’t liked some of the tropes (yes, I’m looking pointedly at the person who had a crush on someone for like A REALLY LONG TIME) I found the bearable and even enjoyable after the initial yuck. Another thing I really liked was the fact that all the characters were really different and not typical at all. Yes, some of them had some cliched behaviors, but all in all those flaws didn’t defined them as characters. I did see a lot of people complaining about the dialogue and I don’t really agree - yes, some of the dialogue is a bit unnatural, but I feel like that’s caused by how long and convoluted the plot is a times. I actually think that dialogue was pretty entertaining.