Letters from Home

While the game takes place in a serene country house being emptied by genial removal men, the player doesn't interact much with the plot or setting on a mimetic level. Rather, they wander about converting things into letters.
While the wordplay-saturated atmosphere was quite pleasant, it wasn't enough to keep me from resorting to a walkthrough after my first encounter with the time limit.
Completing the game without the hints would require multiple playthroughs, a certain amount of trial and error, and, most likely, a bit of research. When a description is curiously specific but the cultural or scientific reference escapes you, I wouldn't hesitate to resort to Google- some of the answers aren't to be found in-game.
I'm tempted to recommend this one for those who enjoy difficult cryptic crosswords, but the game lacks the structural fairness of that standardized form. The items and the letters into which you convert them do not have a consistent relationship.

Letters From Home is an unabashed puzzlefest. There's almost no plot whatsoever. That's absolutely fine by me - this game just wants to be a vehicle for word puzzles, and thankfully they're mostly good puzzles.

There's a cryptic crossword at the end of the game, but the whole game is cryptic, really. You need to have a talent for puns and lateral thinking for this one. I'm quite good at those so I enjoyed myself immensely, but this isn't as consistent and fair in its wordplay as Ad Verbum (for example). Then again, neither is almost every cryptic crossword I've tried.

Most solutions are clued well enough in-game (outside of the Hints menu), but you occasionally run into a bit of under-implementation, and a few puzzles are very obscure - I could have played for a million years without hints and not figured out where the N was hiding. Also, I don't think the time limit adds anything to the game, except for stress when you're trying to find an NPC who walks around randomly. (Thankfully, there's no punishment for exceeding the limit apart from the ending saying "*** You have lost ***".)

The writing is fun considering there's not much of a story. There's a surprisingly good sense of place, and of the PC's relationship to the priory. The jokes are daft too. I wish the NPCs were a little more detailed, but I like the incidental ways they interact with each other.

I'm fond enough of Letters From Home to give it 4 stars, but 3.5 stars (its average at the time of writing) is probably about right. You'll get a lot of the puzzles and feel pretty smart, but just be prepared for the really obscure bits of wordplay.

I'm a fan of wordplay games, so it's only natural that I'd end up liking Letters from Home. It took me a bit of time to understand what I was really supposed to do, but the catch here is that you need to collect letters around an old mansion that's being moved out. To give a few examples from the game, (Spoiler - click to show)taking the "F" that signals Fahrenheit on a thermometer, plucking one of the roman numerals out of a date, or working out homophones like "sea" vs. "C".

Once you've found all of these, you get to solve a cryptic crossword. The clues you get are things like (Spoiler - click to show)"Confused DJ was a KC; that's for the birds. (8)" and "Crystal units of volume, we hear. (6)". I was pretty confused, but the logic does make sense if you think about it in an unconventional way.

Strangely enough, the weaker parts of the game have nothing to do with the homophones or pangrams, but are the standard adventure game-type puzzles. You get an array of standard verbs like JUMP, PUSH, and SEARCH that are used sparingly but easy to forget about. One puzzle has you needing to reach something high up, and the solution is to (Spoiler - click to show)push a bicycle in from another room and stand on that, while another one involving retrieving something from a small crack on the floor involves (Spoiler - click to show)jumping to send it up, then putting a pad of paper (specifically this, nothing else) over the crack to catch it. While the game has a lot of items and rooms, things you don't need to bring elsewhere will be left behind in the rooms after you solve their puzzles, which is a nice detail.

There is one thing that you can lock yourself out of, though, and it's (Spoiler - click to show)one of the crossword clues. I was pretty discouraged to realize this, so a warning to new players: (Spoiler - click to show)don't take the yew tree until you're sure you've done everything with it.

Still, I enjoyed my playthrough overall. While many of the puzzles can rely on esoteric knowledge, that's kind of a given if you're even interested in a game like this. There is also a very detailed hint system, with Invisiclues-style hints that get more direct as you go down the list, so don't be afraid to use it as you play.