Kind Words is a peculiar game about writing nice letters to real strangers while listening to chill music. There's no pressure, tension or objectives—you just relax in your cozy bedroom, scribbling away. It's incredibly sweet, with a surreal but reassuring atmosphere. A deer delivers your mail! I love it.
If you're tense or upset and don't feel like you can share your worries with people you know, you can jot things down in Kind Words and send your letter out into the community, at which point they go into the request queue and people can respond with words of encouragement.
Alternatively, you can also fire off a paper airplane, which can be sent to individuals or to the community in general. If you've just got good vibes to share or you want to thank someone for helping you, just launch one of them out of your window.
As well as sharing fears or advice, players can also share stickers. Everyone starts with some random stickers in their inventory, which can then be sent to other players or stuck on letters. If someone sends you a new sticker, you can copy it and share it with others. Stickers also let you add a bit more character to your bedroom, as they all come with a toy that you can pop on your bed or a shelf.
New to the launch version is an export to HTML feature, which conveniently lets you save letters, keeping them with you when you're not playing the game. If you're out and about and need a little pick-me-up, you can just bring up the webpage on your phone.
Sometimes it's just nice to have people rooting for you, even if they're invisible strangers in a game. And despite the potential for abuse, the community seems to be overwhelmingly lovely and sincere. It only launched yesterday, but prior to that there were still thousands of people writing letters to each other, and so far there don't appear to have been problems.
There is a report feature, too, which sends the letter to the developer and removes it from your list. It might need to be used more now that it's officially released, but hopefully not.
Kind Words is out now on Steam.
