Employee Package and the Joe’s Diner newsletter
Two small pieces of the store that players keep searching for. Neither changes how you play — both change how the place reads.
Last verified 5 August 2026 · game version: 29 July 2026 patch
A promotional prize bundle from Kwalee, distributed through a giveaway rather than sold. There is no in-game content attached to it and nothing in the game is locked behind it.
What was in it
- Shift At Midnight poster
- Red duffel bag
- Soft rat plushie
- Joe's Diner baseball cap
- Employee badge
- Physical OG ticket
- Retro mechanical keyboard
- Retro mouse
The theming is consistent with the game: you play a night-shift employee at a roadside gas station, so the prize is dressed as employee kit — a badge, a cap from Joe's Diner, and 1990s-era peripherals matching the game's retro presentation.
Can you still get one?
The Employee Package was distributed through a Gleam giveaway run by Kwalee. Giveaways of this kind run for a fixed window and then close. We are not going to tell you it is still open, because we cannot verify that it is — and pages that keep stale giveaway links live are how people end up entering competitions that ended months ago.
If you want to know whether anything similar is running now, the reliable sources are Kwalee's own channels and the game's Steam news feed. Not a wiki.
Merch giveaways for horror games attract fake entry pages that harvest logins. If a page asks you to sign in with your Steam or Microsoft account to "claim" a physical prize, close it. A legitimate giveaway does not need your game account credentials. Verify any campaign from the publisher's own channels first.
Is there any paid merch or special edition?
No paid special edition, deluxe edition or season pass has been announced. Shift At Midnight is a single $9.99 release. The only official way to spend more on Steam is one of the three co-op bundles pairing it with Phasmophobia, Escape the Backrooms or YAPYAP — each takes 10% off, and that saving stacks with other Steam discounts (Steam store page). Those buy you other games, not extras for this one — see similar games.
Going the other way, the Steam version supports Family Sharing, so a household can play the single copy without buying a second.
Announced future content is free. The Endless Mode beta is already playable once you finish the story, and its finished version — along with more customers, traps, weapons and monsters — is a free update planned for Q4 2026. None of it is behind a paywall, and none of it is behind a giveaway.
Who writes the Joe’s Diner newsletter?
We do not have a verified in-game answer for who authors the Joe's Diner newsletter, and we are not going to invent one. There is a real difference between “here is the answer” and “here is a plausible-sounding sentence”, and a lot of writing about this game's smaller mysteries is the second thing wearing the clothes of the first.
Why this question exists at all
Shift At Midnight puts readable in-world material in front of you while you work. A newsletter from a nearby diner is exactly the kind of object that reads as flavour on the first shift and as a clue on the fifth — particularly in a game where three achievements are hidden and the community is actively hunting for what triggers them.
The question is being searched because players suspect it matters. That suspicion is reasonable, and it is not the same as evidence.
What we can say
- The game is built around reading things carefully — IDs, behaviour, readings that disagree with each other. In-world text rewards attention by design.
- Three achievements are hidden: Grave Decision (33.1%), True Ending (16.0%), Empty Home (10.1%). None has an official requirement text, though the conditions are now documented. See endings.
- Nothing publicly documented connects the newsletter to those achievements. That is an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.
Screenshot the newsletter every run and note which shift it appeared on and what else was different about that night. If the text varies between runs, that is a strong signal it is procedural flavour. If it is identical every time and names someone, that is a much more interesting fact. Nobody has published that comparison — which is exactly why the question is still open.
If you have run that comparison, that is a genuinely useful contribution. See community.
Why we are leaving this page thin
Because padding it would be worse than admitting we do not know. When we have a verified answer — from reproducible player reports or from the developer — it goes here with the date and the source, and this page gets rewritten properly.