Proximate, Dead Letter Dept., Without a Dawn

published 2025-10-13 | tags: #backlog #games

Jacob Geller is easily my favorite video-game essayist/critic working today. I watch all of his videos, I subscribe to his his Patreon, and I even follow his on-again/off-again podcast "Something Rotten" which is the most thoughtful -- yet "dumb guy" friendly -- critique of games.

So when Geller released his newest video "3 Games / 3 Hours / 3 Cursed Computers " with the context that the three games being talked about each took ~1 hour to complete I was like:

Oh... so I can just play these right now. Before watching the video. I've never done that before...

So I loaded up my cart and bought:

• Proximate
• Dead Letter Dept
• Without a Dawn

Let's talk about them:

Proximate

Proximate was the most mechanically interesting game of the bunch. It's a -- say it with me -- indie horror game that takes place in a sketchy under-sea research vessel. But the bit is you can't see anything, you are forced to use a headset that uses "AI" to describe your surroundings.

This means you have the following data:

• What the THING is that AI thinks you're looking at.
• A % confidence score for that read-out.
• A distance meter so you know how close you are to THING.
• A compass so you know what direction you're looking.
• A waypoint marker for where you need to go/home base.

This means while you're technically just staring at the word "WOMAN 48%" you know that woman is probably in a horrific scene based on the "KETCHUP 89%" and "MINCED BEEF 92%" to her left and right.

And honestly this is a genius mechanic. Just like when you read a book and fill in the details with the most horrific version of events, you fill in the details of what you're reading with horrific visuals in far grater detail than the 1-person team could probably achieve otherwise.

The game also ended with a really nice note from the developer and I just love when I play a game by a single person and they end it with "Hey thank you for playing my game and thanks to my family and friends for supporting me". It's really sweet.

Without a Dawn

Without a dawn is a piece of interactive fiction which has striking visuals and a... fine story. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing bad about the story, it's just compared to the visuals the story felt... secondary.

The visuals are an ascii shader implemented on top of what I think is pixel art that gives it a really unique style and makes what would have otherwise been a really forgettable game into something I'll be thinking about for a while. There are also options for the game like how much shimmer to add to the image, what character set, color scheme, backgrounds, etc. It almost had an "Obra Dinn" vibe but in a pixel art visual novel.

My big gripe with the story is that for most of the "go/no-go" dialog options, the "no-go" option is not real, but rather it just delays the actual choice the game forces you into. Like... literally you choose "stay" and it says some version of "Ok" then you are presented with the same choice again forever. I know that is the authors intent but it makes the presence of the choice feel cheap, like yet another game that railroads your choices, in a really transparent way. I would rather have had the "fake choice" be implemented with some sort of character movement and the game nudging you to move if you are still for too long. But I don't want to dwell too much on comparing this game to a non-existent game in my head -- I hate when critics do that.

This also ended with a little note from the developer and I also thought it was sweet. More games need to do that.

Dead Letter Dept

I did 1 run in this game and it took me ~2.5 hours so you know... not quite the quick little spooky journey I was hoping for but still relatively short.

The bit for this game, at least in my single run, is that you are a data entry person transcribing writing on letters that the postal service's computers cannot transcribe automatically. As you can imagine there are spooky letters with ominous writing/photos/context around them, environments with (as Geller describes) "The worst vibes", and some really unsettling music. You also umm... fall into madness. At least that was how my run went. Yippee.

The visuals of this, similar to the other two games, has a very degraded digital camera look. The shader work was not nearly as interesting as Without a Dawn, but did it's job. I'm realizing though that I am really just not into the "This game looks like shit and it's hard to see anything" aesthetic of a lot that a lot of indie horror games go for. It works and it's doing exactly what it's setting out to do, but just feels gimmicky to me.

I liked the "typing game" mechanic and was pleasantly surprised at how fleshed out the rest of the world was, walking through the world to commute to work for example. I was expecting more of a "Papers Please" thing where you just "arrive" at work every day but no you actually have to go to work.

I'm sure if I did another run or two I would have more to say since it's a "different every run" type of game but I feel like I got what I will out of it.

...

... is what I thought before I watched Jacob Geller's video! Geller pointed out that you can address letters to your apartment -- intentionally. And you will receive them the next day!

I of course knew this because the game prompts you with a letter with your address on the second day and you receive it on the third morning -- but it never occurred to me that I could you know... lie to the computer.

I did a second run where I sent every letter to myself. I would suggest not doing this as I was promptly fired.

So while there are 10 (I think?) endings I am content with my 2 for now. I don't really need to get all the endings in "Spooky Stanley Parable" right now, but I appreciate it much more after the context added by a wonderful video essay which, I would like to remind you, you should have watched instead of reading this post.