The Letter 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 instantly 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.