Anyone with a passing knowledge of silent cinema and, especially, Nosferatu might begin to connect the relationship of German Expressionism to Frey's latest game, Letters to a Friend: Farewell, the initial episode in an anthology of stories bound by the aesthetics of silent projection, the eerie grain of the audio track, the smudgy film stock, and the movement of the reel. As with his prior work, the slow, methodical pace envelops the player within the grasp of an unknowable terror and anxiety which never rears its head with the jump scare nor the obvious horrors expected of a situation. The notary assistant's drive and his time within the home he must receive a testament upon leech tropes well known, yet the unraveling situation features a form of grief and abuse reserved to a domestic space which scares in its repeated investigation by the player. Frey's games are not for the impatient nor those incapable of putting the slightest effort into interpretation and understanding where abstraction and the unspoken leave room enough for players to form such thoughts for his games. Letters to a Friend: Farewell is no different, and its encompassing exploration of a home and its resident function a transgressive refutation of the horrors the game's aesthetics draw from, in particular Nosferatu and, in some fashion, Murnau's later non-horror film, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

very unique horror game
highly recommend going into it blind

would also recommend
Letter To A Friend - AsylumJam 2015 Entry
different game in the same style by the same dev

I consider myself a pretty big fan of Christoph Frey, whose 2012 game Horror Vacui was a formative experience for lil 18 year old me dipping my toes into indie art games back in the day, and whose 2019 follow up The Space Between has rattled around in my head since it came out, a deeply resonant experience for a physically and emotionally repressed little queer like myself and now one of my favorite games, so I was a little miffed with myself when I found out from some random Errant Signal video in my youtube recs that his new game had actually been released EIGHT MONTHS AGO and flown entirely under my radar whoops!

Frey as a horror guy is very much in the camp of slow burn tone pieces without ever a thing to chase you or many overt scares. His body of work is heavy with symbolism and abstraction, often concerned with memory and our interpretations of our perceptions of where we’ve been and where we are. Characters often speak in overtly philosophical, thematic language and the works intentionally raise many questions and give no definitive answers. Real thinkers. Pace is deliberately slow and often there are things deliberately set in place to enforce this; in Horror Vacui the very world itself is hostile to your presence, with aggressive visual filters that make it difficult to ascertain where and how you’re moving, making the vignettes of memory feel even more like islands of prescience than they already do. It’s hard to physically see where you’re going or how far you’re moving. In The Space Between control is frequently wrestled from you for dialogue sequences with loooooong pauses between lines. It enforces the pace and the tone. These games are all less than an hour long, so the slowness here is not really that much to ask in the scheme of things, and the payoff is, in my opinion, enormous.

These design throughlines are carried forward into Letters To A Friend – Episode I: Farewell, where a modern story of the player character working as a notary being sent to Joseph Hall’s house after his death so his son Markus can sign the paperwork saying he doesn’t want to inherit it, is presented as an aggressively deteriorated silent film, with intense grain and shadowing constantly pulsing with each frame and scratches flickering constantly all over the screen. Where The Space Between would leave dialogue to subtitles and who exactly was speaking became increasingly unclear as the game went on, Farewell removes audio entirely (until it pointedly chooses not to in a deeply unsettling moment) and relegates all dialogue and internality to silent film cutaway screens. This distortion of the visual and absence of audio in the traditional sense plays havoc with your sense of grounding as a body within the game world despite the first-person perspective. It makes it easy to lose track of Markus in mundane situations, to see images leaping in corners that aren’t there, and the field of vision is so generally restricted by the narrow aspect ratio and the heavy visual distortion that it would be difficult to keep bearings even with a full aural experience. I’m not well-read enough in arthouse European cinema to make specific claims confidently (BUT I WILL LMAO) but it’s hard not to imagine the influence of expressionism on the style here, in the subtle ways the environment is warped and unnatural, with structures in the background weirdly large and imposing, and the house feeling like it’s leaning in on you, with these impulses becoming more and more overt as things begin to unravel over time, in the attic, in the sewer. I could swear there are direct references to Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari if I knew even slightly what I was talking about.

But these ideas go beyond the aesthetic and into the literal events and themes of the work. Early in the game as your character is looking through the house you find a series of…disturbing (?) images on the wall. A locked barred door. A pair of hands folded together. Something…difficult to parse. Later on, as tension is mounting and things are definitely Wrong but the proverbial balloon has yet to pop, Markus takes you to the barred door and the game cuts to the image, imposing the memory forcefully on you. This choice is obviously deliberate, this game is like 30 minutes long, you remember the pictures, they were weird, but Farewell wants to highlight to you that what was inside the confines of that image, the borders of that picture, is real, and important, and asserting itself. Inside is the third picture, some sort of chamber, with a stone slab in the middle. Markus says he didn’t know this was here, he doesn’t know what it is, only that it feels right to him. If you’re a boring person then the game might give you reasons to question the truth of this statement, but I like it at face value. What is inside is forcing itself out. These things happen.

Markus tells you about his relationship with his father, says he always took care of him, says he never wanted to stop taking care of him, that he didn’t like it when he took ill and it became Markus’ turn to be the caretaker. He didn’t stop, he says. Words hang in the air in this game, with ill portent but also literally, on the screen, in the silent film cutaway frames. I don’t want to just lay out what happens in the game, it’s very short and only costs six US dollars and I very much think you should play it if you’re inclined. I don’t think it’s a game about fathers, necessarily, but it might be a game about what fathers do to us. It’s a game about feeling. As things become more explicit, more malevolent, more explosive, as the pot boils over, that expressionist bent becomes more and more clear, faces distorting with feeling, environments intensifying in the wake of repressions that can no longer be denied and things rush toward an abrupt, unsettling conclusion.

I don’t think Farewell reaches the intensity of scariness that The Space Between does in its final scenes but it’s certainly a tighter package and more immediately dedicated to a consistent, tense atmosphere. It's Frey’s most straightforward game in terms of linear narrative but it’s characteristically dense with themes and symbolism that I’m sure will validate many readings. I see a throughline in his work of repression, of denial of the self and the way that hurts us and leads us to hurt the people around us, but I’ll freely admit that I’m bringing myself to that read, and I’ve read things about The Space Between that would not have come to me and make me go whoa damn that’s fucking sick. These games are cool they’re very rich and I’m very happy that Farewell carries on that tradition so strongly. The idea of an anthology of works has me really excited, wondering what will link them beyond them being games made by Christoph Frey. I’ve seen what he’s got cooking on twitter today and it looks fucking dope man, I could not be more jazzed about this particular corner of indie horror right now.

The act of existing as a player character in this game is disquieting. The excellently constructed silent-film shader that swallows the entire world creates dark nooks and crannies that you shudder to consider the contents of. The tension can be cut with a knife, and when shit hits the fan, the very shape of the horror is difficult to parse.

The half-star was removed just due to the game being very slow and quiet when more horrific scenarios could have done it good. Still: Can't wait to see where the "Letters to a Friend" series goes from here.