DEAR SUSPECT

The 1900s, deep in the Rocky Mountains. An entire family dies within a single week. No one knows the truth.

You are the detective called in to investigate. But someone would rather you didn't live to finish. Driven into hiding, you take shelter in a cabin in the woods outside the town of Blackpine, unable to set foot past its edge. Your only link to the outside world is a handful of letters each day.

Writing letters is your only means of investigation.

Each morning you step out to collect the supplies and mail the hunter leaves at your door, comb the newspaper for leads, write to the townsfolk with your questions, and send your assistant to specific places to gather evidence. The next day, the replies and findings arrive. In your notebook you fit the fragments together, piece by piece: who killed whom, by what means, and why.

But every letter carries weight. You have only a few chances to write each day, and every question is an irreversible expenditure. Ask the wrong person, or the wrong thing, and the day is gone. And your time is running out.

Each person holds only one fragment of the truth.

The town doctor knows the cause of death but not the web of relationships. The priest has heard confession, yet his faith keeps him from speaking freely. The housekeeper saw everything in the house, and by instinct wraps the ugly facts in proper, polite words. Every contact has their own boundaries of knowledge and their own character. Their replies are driven by AI, each carrying its own bias, hesitation, and silence. The truth is assembled, slowly, from many incomplete points of view.

Someone is dismantling your investigation from within.

Evidence vanishes before you reach it. Witnesses fall silent before you can press them: some because they have already met a terrible end, others because they have slipped into madness. Somewhere you cannot see, a person you have never met is drawing the noose tighter, one move at a time.

At its heart, Dear Suspect is a story about love and crime as two faces of one coin, and about learning, letter by letter, to trust your own voice.

Features

🔍Letters as Investigation

No dialogue boxes. No hard-boiled detective roaming crime scenes. Every action takes place at a single desk: writing letters, reading replies, scanning newspapers, dispatching assistants, and organizing your notebook. Every letter is a strategic decision. You are the armchair detective.

📓Notebook + Deduction Board

You have a notebook that records your insights about each character and the case itself. The deduction board is where you test your theories. Truth is distilled from it.

📰Filtering Signal from Noise

A newspaper arrives every day. Eighty percent of it is irrelevant: weather reports, advertisements, sports columns. The remaining twenty percent may hide crucial clues: a new address, a forgotten old report, or a lead pointing toward the next question.

🕯️Horror Embedded in Deduction

Horror seeps into everyday life through text. When a contact suddenly goes mad or dies, that event is itself a clue: something in their testimony must have mattered to the killer. Your hunters and assistants, too, walk the edge of the blade because of you.

⏳Time Loop

The pursuer will find you. For mysterious reasons, everything begins again. But your notebook remains. You investigate again with knowledge from the previous loop, moving faster, sharper, and closer to the final truth each time.

🎭AI-Driven Character Replies

Every NPC has an independent personality, memory, and boundary of knowledge. They are living people, not information databases. Some cooperate, some evade, and some build lies out of truth.

🃏A Formidable Adversary

This opponent is no ordinary killer. He is neither a cold-blooded murderer nor a reckless brute. His methods of manipulation, movements, and identity are all nearly airtight. Can you find the fracture in his design? Remember: you may already be corresponding with him.