Workplace dystopia Diacritic combines cryptic poetry with satisfying puzzles

Dayten Rose, 11 March 2025

Over Steam Next Fest, I learned that I’m an excellent Diacritic. What is a Diacritic? Well, it’s a sort of… It's kind of like… I would describe it as...Actually, I don’t owe you an explanation! When playing Diacritic, I clock in for an honest day’s work just like anybody else, even if that work ostensibly serves a shadowy bureaucracy. Sure, the Eastern Coast of England (or what remains of it) is choked by volcanic ash, but that's not my problem. I'm more concerned with losing myself in the pleasures of monotony.

Diacritic is unquestionably that: monotonous. But “monotonous” doesn’t mean “boring.” Repetitive puzzles, spliced together with bits of mysterious world-building, enhance the atmosphere of quiet dread that defines the genre of workplace dystopias. Even though the puzzles themselves don’t seem to reveal much, I get the feeling the full release will still be chock-a-block with surprises.

Gameplay surprises don’t seem to be a focus of Diacritic, anyway. The wire-frame shapes I manipulate change, and some of the patterns I’m asked to line them up with are more complex than others, but altogether, I’m not sure I’ve spent more than 30 seconds on a single puzzle. That’s because the difficulty of any given puzzle is less important than the rhythm of solving them. Diacritic takes place entirely in the interface of a one-bit corporate desktop. I’m working task by task, day by day, and case by case, just like any job.

Only the start of each day gives reprieve to the onslaught of case work, giving me the opportunity to check up on emails and complete odd jobs as assigned by my superiors. One of the first emails I receive warns me how easy it is to lose track of time. Big ups to Diacritic for calling that shot, because lose time I did. Mastery didn’t motivate me to keep playing as in other, more systems-focused puzzlers. It was the electrical hum of my machine, the click of the controls, the bleeding of shape into shape and the tailwind of mystery that kept me at my desk (so to speak).

Diacritic’s top-notch writing isn’t confined to its emails, either. Between each bite-sized task, you’re presented with a few lines from the diary of a man named Yeardsley. I’ll avoid spoilers since his story evolves quickly and surprisingly even in the demo, but by way of hooking you like his story hooked me: the very first line expresses his delight at the murder of a man named Burt, the cook on a lawless “factory island” and a key step in Yeardsley’s plan to escape to the vaguely apocalyptic mainland..

There’s a poetic style to the snippets. No one, least of all Yeardsley, says exactly what they mean. Transcripts, excerpts and emails brush against a quasi-religious Council, rampant consumerism (an advisory email about mental health and wellness suggests that I buy, among other things, a gun) and mutated wildlife. Others prod the nature of your work as a Diacritic. Still others advance a meta-plot implicating the player, hinting at an actual character behind the screen.

What I mean is, get ready for a lot of reading. But only rarely did the sheer quantity of text frustrate me, particularly when I felt like I was being told where to direct my attention or how to engage with the uncertainty of the world. There’s noticeable tension between Diacritic’s desire to be a capital-m Mystery game—one that will eventually answer the questions that it poses—and its desire to simply be mysterious. Still, like all great interactive fiction, I never felt that the writing got in the way of the puzzling, or vice versa. Gameplay segments provide time and context to process the text, and I began to read (maybe spurious) meaning in the shapes as well as the text. I can’t imagine one without the other.

Diacritic forces you to focus on a set of narrow tasks before giving way to a world that is unwell, and the only hope comes if grunt workers like you start to rattle the bars of your cage. Its Steam store page even mentions a divine Critic, hinting at cultish themes on the horizon. Its unfolding balance of suffocation and curiosity evoked a similar feeling to my recent time with Severance. Playing this demo while my partner and I caught up on the show honestly put me in the shoes of the characters and informed how I view their motivations.

These are all building blocks we’ve seen in stories from Papers, Please to the works of Franz Kafka. I clicked with Diacritic for many of the same reasons I’ve fallen in love with Severance, but I’m also confident it will take those core themes in a wholly new direction.

As for the game itself, I’m curious to see how it will evolve alongside the narrative, or whether it does. The puzzles so far have certainly hit on a formula that sinks into the back of my mind even as I’m playing it. I don’t know why I’m doing any of it, but the meaning seems to be somewhere in there. After all, the work is mysterious and important.