Matter prejudicial to morale

The men have gone to the war. Far behind a front nobody names, the sorting hall is staffed by women who read other people's mail for the Bureau. You have a stamp, a pen, and a card of regulations listing what a soldier must not be told.

Two strangers write to each other through your desk. They have never met, and everything between them is on the paper you are holding. When you bar a line, it is gone from the romance itself as well as from the page. Pass a tenderness and it reaches the other side. Strike it, and as far as either of them will ever know, it was never written.

At the desk

• Open each letter, strike what must not pass, and stamp it on its way. Your rulings move two things: the bond between the lovers, and how closely the office is watching you.
  
• Before some letters leave your hands, you may copy a single line into a copybook.
  
• Later, you learn to leave a few words standing in a struck line, in reply.
  
• Every ruling is filed. There is no undo at the desk.

What the regulations do not cover

A letter answers a question you only asked in your head. A line you struck weeks ago comes back, uncrossed, in another hand. One of the two stops writing to the other and starts writing to you. The game never says whether the paper is haunted or whether you are coming apart at your desk.

On paper

About 30,000 to 45,000 words of letters, prose and marginalia, roughly two to four hours, in one sitting or two. It can end six ways, decided by two fates at once: what becomes of the lovers, and what becomes of you. The surface is realistic and the story never explains what is wrong underneath it. Ink, gaslight, sorting halls, a waltz heard through a café wall, in a world that feels old and European and never gives its name. Eleven languages at launch. Single-player, text-based, choice-driven.

Dear Nobody's prose is human–AI co-written and human-edited under the author's direction. Its illustrations and ending vignettes are pre-generated with AI image tools and then curated and edited; the music is generated with AI tools; ambience and effects are recorded sound. Nothing is generated while you play.