The Letter - Horror Visual Novel Reviews

ashton frey my beloved

This visual novel is great because it's long, the dialogues are fully voice acted in English, you play as different characters so you can understand the story in different perspectives (but that also leads to repetition), and it have different endings to offer which depends on the choices you made. There are mini animations and mini-games where you fought against the ghost, which makes the story more immersive.

So far, it's good. I've been playing on Deck. I had read the game's QTEs require a full keyboard, so I disabled QTEs in the options. On Deck it defaults to trackpad as mouse and using A to proceed text, so it's easy to play this as a purely reading visual novel and use the trackpad to save and exit.

[i]The Letter[/i] is an incredibly large visual novel—my first playthrough alone took around 19 hours to complete. While there certainly is a lot of reading, the whole thing is fully voice-acted (with great actors), which helps a lot. It wasn't until my second playthrough, however, that I truly realized just how much this story could drastically change. A character I assumed to be essential to the plot the first time around was written out in my second playthrough with just a couple of bad choices, and the game didn't abruptly end with a non-standard game over (or gloss over their ensuing absence). Instead, it continued, with their loss factoring into the continuing story in a way that almost felt as if it was meant to happen. I was also convinced at the time that characters I lost the first time around were meant to go with how naturally the story played out without them—only to find out in subsequent playthroughs that their loss was not necessary at all. Achievement hunters will love finding all the ways they can shape the story, with dozens of achievements to earn for doing so. Completionists, however, will likely find exploring every possible path in the final two chapters to be quite difficult. Fortunately, the developers have included plenty of quality-of-life features to help with doing all of this. An option to [i]instantly[/i] skip all previously-seen text up until the next choice (allowing playthroughs to potentially be completed in mere minutes!), a branching tree to track what choices have been made while showing what choices remain to be made, and a gallery of all that you've seen thus far are all very helpful.