DEAR SUSPECT

The Rocky Mountains, deep wilderness. The 1900s. An entire family dead within a single week. No one knows the truth.
You are the detective brought in to investigate. But someone doesn't want you alive long enough to finish the job. You've been forced into hiding — a lone cabin in the woods outside Blackpine — unable to set foot in town. Your only connection to the outside world is a handful of letters each day.
Writing letters is your only means of investigation.
Each morning, you step outside to collect supplies and mail delivered by the hunter — sifting through the newspaper for clues, writing to your contacts in town with questions, dispatching your assistant to specific locations to gather physical evidence.
The next day, replies and field reports arrive. In your notebook, you piece the fragments together, one by one — who killed whom, by what means, and why.
But every letter has weight. You have only a few chances to write each day. Every question is an irreversible investment of resources — ask the wrong person, chase the wrong lead, and the day is gone. And your time is running out.
Every person knows only one piece of the truth.
The town doctor knows the cause of death, but nothing of the family's relationships. The priest has heard confessions, but his faith keeps his mouth shut. The housekeeper witnessed everything inside that manor — yet instinctively wraps uncomfortable facts in the language of propriety. Each contact has their own knowledge, their own limits, their own character. Their replies are AI-driven, carrying personal biases, hesitations, and silences. The truth isn't discovered — it's assembled from a dozen incomplete perspectives.
Someone is dismantling your investigation from the inside.
Evidence vanishes before you can reach it. Informants go quiet before you can press them — some out of fear, some because they're already dead. Your letters arrive with broken seals. Your assistant sends back frantic, rattled field reports. The newspaper runs a story that shouldn't exist. Somewhere beyond your sight, a person you've never met is slowly tightening the noose.
Features
🔍 Letters Are Your Only Weapon — No dialogue trees. No hardboiled detective kicking down doors. Every action you take happens at a writing desk: drafting letters, reading replies, scanning the newspaper, dispatching your assistant, updating your notebook. Every letter is a strategic decision. You are the armchair detective.
📓 Evidence Board + Deduction Board — Your notebook opens to two pages: the left collects all evidence; the right is where you write your conclusions. When two pieces of evidence contradict each other, the system flags the conflict — but it won't tell you which one is the lie.
📰 Signal in the Noise — One newspaper per day. Eighty percent of it is irrelevant — weather, advertisements, local sports. But somewhere in the remaining twenty percent: a new address, a piece of forgotten history, a thread that leads to your next question.
🕯️ Horror Is Not Atmosphere — It's Evidence — Dread seeps into the ordinary through text. When a contact is suddenly killed, it isn't just a horror event — it is a clue: whatever they knew, the killer needed it silenced. The hunter and your assistant move through danger on your behalf. That danger is real.
⏳ The Loop — The killer will find you. For reasons yet unknown, everything resets and begins again. But your notebook carries over. Return to the investigation armed with everything you learned before — each loop faster, sharper, closer to the final truth.
🎭 AI-Driven Correspondence — Every NPC has a distinct personality, memory, and knowledge boundary. They are not information databases. They are people — some cooperative, some evasive, some who build lies entirely out of true statements.
🃏 A Formidable Adversary — This opponent is no ordinary person. Not a cold-blooded killer. Not a blundering thug. His methods of manipulation, his movements, his identity — everything is airtight.
Can you turn the tables before he closes in?
Don't forget — you may already be writing to him.