Papers Please goes to Hell in The Mailroom and you can play its devilishly appealing demo now
Think your job is hell? It’s got nothing on The Mailroom, which casts you as a harried soul charged with sorting through the underworld’s post. And, while the full game’s a while off, you can take its demo for a spin right now.
How did you get this job? The Mailroom isn’t entire clearly, you just turned up one day. But it’s not a role you’ll want to walk away from. Developer Crowfriend calls it a scarier version of “Papers, Please” set in the Devil’s corporate office but, having dabbled in the demo, it’s clear it’s not just some pale imitation of Lucas Pope’s gem.
You’re initially tasked with collecting post and, depending on whether it’s solicited or not, sending it onto the appropriate person. Junk mail and misdirected letters get thrown into the furnace which, in turn, means keeping it fuelled. Likewise, if the recipient’s not in the ‘company’ directory, it’s incineration time.
But despite all that hellfire, The Mailroom’s office is unsettlingly gloomy; think Scrooge’s office in the movie of the same name and you’re not far off. Your only companion is the being who delivers the mail; hit the bell and they materalise right behind you, a disturbing spectacle that kept us on edge.
What really makes The Mailroom stand out, though we only got a taste of it before the demo ending, is that, rather than just introducing additional rules, it adds in puzzles. It took us a good while to figure out that the upstairs management wanted us to literally cram a frog into a pneumatic tube.
Our next task? Disecting another of the amphibians, or it would have been in the demo didn’t end there. In the full game you’ll “Dissect and process raw ingredients into materials needed by the upper floors”. which reminds us the superlative The Trapdoor.
We’re also more than a little suspicions of the ‘security office’ and the letters that keep telling us to “RUN!”. We doubt the game will go full Five Nights at Freddy’s but we can’t shake the feeling that The Mailroom’s final incarnation is going to introduce a few unwelcome visitors.
The Mailroom is pencilled in for a 2026 release. In the meantime, you can download its demo here on Steam.
