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Tech

Beat This Game by Sending Evil Amounts of Junk Mail

In 'Unsolicited,' there's a quota to meet. And if you fail to meet it or send too many letters with errors in them, you'll get fired.
Image: Lucas Pope.

If you have a mailing address, you get junk mail. From coupons to catalogs, junk snail mail is still very much a thing, and it's more annoying to get rid of than junk email because you have to physically carry it over to the trash. But where does it all come from?

Unsolicited, a small game created for the marathon game development competition Ludum Dare 33, answers that question by turning you into the person who fills out the forms and stuffs the envelopes that clutter your mailbox.

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You get a list of tasks with the name, dates, and other details about the person you're shipping the letters to. Then you take the right form, select the right information from drop-down menus, sign, seal, and send it out.

It starts out simple enough. Just a couple of letters asking for donations for a good cause, but things quickly ramp up, and you're asked to send letters for timeshare offers, shady sweepstakes, and other, less altruistic business. There's a quota to meet, and if you fail to meet it or send too many letters with errors in them, you'll get fired.

Unsolicited was created by Lucas Pope, and this drudgery and bureaucracy as gameplay idea is something he'd perfected with Papers, Please, the critically-acclaimed indie game that had you playing an immigration officer at an Eastern Bloc border.

Unsolicited was made for Ludum Dare 33, which is asking developers to make a game around the theme "You Are the Monster." Much like Papers, Please, Pope's Unsolicited makes you do terrible things, but also realize that the monster in question is under a fair bit of pressure itself.

You can play Unsolicited for free here. Ludum Dare 33 still has a few hours to go, and you can find all the entries here.