Back in 2023, when we talked about Saint Maker, I mentioned that the developers had previous made a horror visual novel called The Letter, which I hadn’t played yet.

Well, this October I finally decided to check out The Letter.

(I played it on the Switch, but it’s on other platforms as well.)

The Letter is a horror visual novel about a group of people who encounter a strange letter that leads to them being cursed, pursued by a ghost seemingly intent on killing them.

I initially expected a quicker build-up in the story, but there’s actually a fair amount of quieter horror and interpersonal drama as the characters attempt to go about their ordinary lives. Occasionally I felt like this went too far; a character would encounter a frightening paranormal event and then seemingly forget about it a while, but for the most part it was fine. I especially enjoyed how each chapter follows a different character, so you gain new perspective on the characters and events as you play.

Once the horror ramps up, it has some brutal death scenes, too.

There are also occasional quick-time events to avoid game overs, but you can skip these or even set them to automatically skip if you don’t want to deal with them.

What stands out the most about The Letter, however, is its ambition.

Structurally, this is the opposite of Saint Maker. I criticized Saint Maker for feeling almost like a kinetic novel but having too many choices that didn’t affect anything, but The Letter has nothing but choices that affect things.

Because of the way the chapters overlap, choices you make with one character affect the other characters’ scenes. This can be something as mild as how dialogue plays out or as serious as whether or not a character is alive later on, and these branches compound on each other over time. When I reached my first ending, I’d seen only 9% of the scenes in the final chapter due to how many variations there are from all the previous choices. On my second playthrough, it wasn’t long before I encountered long sequences of entirely new scenes because my choices had led to different characters surviving.

Now, eventually it did reach a point where the last two chapters had scenes I’d basically seen before, but were being treated as new since different characters were present this time, but that’s a minor gripe when it lets you get that far with nearly any combination of characters surviving (and the skip function is otherwise a godsend).

And while that’s already ambitious enough, each character also has a relationship stat with every other character, which leads to even more ending variants due to possible romances and friendships.

I haven’t seen all the possible epilogues, let alone 100% of the scenes. But after my first playthrough, I did a second playthrough where I made the opposite choices, and then a run where everyone died and a run where everyone survived, and then I played through one more time for the true ending. After those five playthroughs, I feel satisfied that I’ve seen at least a majority of what the game has to offer.

Overall, I really enjoyed The Letter. I wish some things were clearer (and that it was easier to view the memory fragments that reveal the backstory), but it’s a great visual novel and an excellent choice for Halloween.