Dead Letters - Bayou

THE LEVEE IS GONE.
THE WATER IS STILL RISING.
THE ROLLS DON'T BALANCE.

A hurricane has put Ste. Aubade Parish, Louisiana under water — the road first, the levee not long after. You're one of four staff held at the parish records annex deep in the basin, working the only line still up: a storm-battered river-gauge telemetry link. Somebody pries an old terminal out of a supply crate. It shouldn't boot. It does — and dials straight into a bulletin board that was supposed to be dead.

It isn't the annex's board. It's the whole parish's — neighbors, the shelter at St. Jude's, families wading out to search for each other, the store, the church saying the missing at Mass. Ordinary life, still posting, while the water keeps climbing behind it.

You read. That's the whole game — parish notices, a death ledger going back generations, disappearance reports, damage claims, and the occasional scanned document or crackling radio log worth your attention. Everything renders on a warm, sodium-green CRT that hums, floods, and drowns out whole boards as the session goes on.

Nothing announces itself. A name turns up in the death register before the storm has taken anyone. A parish deputy asks one question too many and ends up on the rolls himself. The drowned are written in. Some, over the years, get quietly written back off — and the same hand does both.

The ledger doesn't just lose the drowned. Somewhere behind it, something has been keeping the count even — storm after storm, family after family — and it isn't finished.

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✦ FEATURES

• A mystery across a six-day hurricane, with three endings shaped by how much you piece together before the line goes down
• Rising water — a flood level climbs over the session and submerges whole boards and posts. What you don't read before it goes under, you lose for good
• A whole parish's community board, not just the annex crew's — neighbors, a shelter headcount, a long local history of the missing and unsolved
• A diegetic 1996 comms terminal: warm phosphor bloom, a synthesized dial-up handshake, and a marginal signal that stutters through the storm
• Audio logs and scanned documents attached to key posts, revealed slow, the way a dial-up line hands them over
• A private notebook for the names, dates, and discrepancies you'll need to hold onto
• Eight boards, a crew of four, and a parish with a very old arrangement for keeping its books even

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✦ HOW TO PLAY

This is a reading game. Click a board in the sidebar (or press its letter key) and open posts to read them — that's the whole of it.

There's no task to finish, no score, and no clock on screen except the water itself. The board changes on its own, day by day, whether you read it or not — and what the flood reaches, you don't get back.

• [R] — reply to any post. Most of the time no one answers; half the parish is wading through worse right now. Every so often, someone does.
• [O] — open your notebook
• [?] — open help

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⚠ CONTENT WARNING

Atmospheric / psychological horror. Themes of drowning, disappearance, death, grief, and administrative erasure.

No gore, no jump scares — the dread is quiet.

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A standalone entry in the Dead Letters series — playable on its own, though series readers will recognize the network humming underneath.

Inspired by Her Story, Hypnospace Outlaw, Norco, and Disco Elysium.

Read fast. Say their names. Don't follow the light onto the water.