The Roottrees are Dead studio Evil Trout gives William Rous’ brilliant lo-fi deduction thriller Type Help a slick remake, and while the changes are many, it remains a smart, rewarding, and hauntingly effective mystery.
There’s a machine in The Incident at Galley House you’ll spend an awful lot of time with, and it’s a wonderfully tactile thing. It’s part mixing desk, part paranormal enigma, part over-engineered Guess Who game, and full of clicky dials, chunky buttons, and a big old whooshy lever you’re forever manipulating. And if your deductive instincts are good enough, it whirs into crackling life like a haunted slot machine, rigged to deliver strange psychic visions.
It’s one of several changes this intricate glow-up of last year’s acclaimed (and Inkle-approved) mystery adventure Type Help makes, and the differences are fascinating. In its original free guise, William Rous’ Type Help offered a moody lo-fi trawl through an ancient computer hard drive, presenting its central mystery – of an abandoned murder case and a chilling slow burn sink into loss and paranoia – entirely through text. It demanded players use a command line interface to scour annotated transcripts of a fateful night in 1936, intuiting the whos, whats, whens, and whys to delve even deeper using an earlier investigator’s elaborate indexing system. There was an elegance and intimacy to its rudimentary interface that made its intricate narrative and deductive excavation even more consuming.
By contrast, The Incident at Galley House (from Evil Trout, the studio behind last year’s highly acclaimed deductive adventure The Roottrees are Dead) trades minimalism for maximalism, and the grounded analogue realism of the original Type Help for a kind of spooky tech-magic abstraction. The vibe’s different enough that trying to answer the question ‘Which one is better?’ feels like a pretty futile undertaking. Evil Trout’s remake, though, is inarguably the more accessible of the two, skilfully adapting Type Help’s somewhat intimidating text-only systems to create a far more welcoming game.
It starts with those murders: eleven corpses found at Galley House, ten of them still doggedly eluding identification years later. Except it’s not 1936 and we’re somewhere much closer to the present, attempting to solve the mystery using an abstrusely engineered “seance machine”. It’s a slightly daft tech contrivance Evil Trout uses to explain away why Type Help’s text-only transcripts now manifest with sound and voice and images. And it’s an abstraction that feels a little distancing – twiddling fake knobs to manifest psychic visions doesn’t provide quite the same kind of immediacy and connection as rummaging through a fake computer by typing away at your real one – but the studio makes up for it elsewhere.
On a fundamental level, though, this is the same game, utilising the same rich transcripts and built around the same sort of database reverse-engineering that made the original so rewarding. Here, the 1936 incident visually unfolds across a 24-hour timeline split loosely into one-hour blocks. At any time, Galley House’s guests can be found somewhere on its grounds, and by carefully scrutinising the currently available transcripts, it’s possible to discern – or at least infer – who is where and when and with who. In turn, this information can be reduced to a simple code and then fed into your machine, one satisfyingly chunky dial twiddle and button prod at a time. Get the details wrong and you’re rewarded with an anticlimactic electronic fart; get it right and you’ll unlock a new scene.
In that regard it’s simple, but Galley House immediately complicates things with obfuscation. It’s not quite so withholding as playing in text, true – you see where each scene takes place and hear its principal characters’ voices – but you don’t at first know their motives, relationships, names, or faces. So for a while, your primary goal is identification, listening out for name drops and other scraps of information, assigning names to faces where possible, then revisiting past recordings to see if you can learn anything new after all that recontextualisation.
It’s properly satisfying when a big-brained plan comes together, and its connective threads are carefully balanced between blatantly obvious and trial-and-error inscrutable. Galley House massages the pen-and-paper demands of the original too, featuring some smartly designed visual tools that let you quickly leap between timelines, people, and places, cross-referencing and annotating at will – and reducing the likelihood you’ll get too lost in history’s labyrinthine muddle. Detective work does, admittedly, settle into a slightly less interesting groove at the midpoint, when it’s more about figuring out everyone’s timetable, but it’s a marginal complaint given the thunderous story turns and some clever structural design that gradually pares things back to ensure increasingly taut narrative momentum.
For a long while, mind, Galley House feels as much interpersonal drama as it does mystery, as much Downton Abbey as it is Agatha Christie. And the script takes time, and a lot of words, to lay down some critical foundations. This creates another challenge for Evil Trout and the studio opts to bring the wordy story to life through a more accessible mix of visuals and audio.
Art-wise, there’s a bit of 3D to give your ludicrous paranormal contraptions some presence, but scenes from the past are primarily delivered through lavish 2D backdrops and static, single-pose character art. It’s serviceable enough, sometimes striking, but equally hampered by awkward corner-cutting. Characters rigidly teleport around scenes, standing blank-faced and motionless in moments of high drama. Poignant scenes of their deaths turn ridiculous as they stay on their feet while characters fret around them. And the key character-swapping puzzle mechanic means that, to avoid having to draw everyone in every situation, characters distractingly revert to silhouettes when they aren’t standing.
Where it underwhelms visually, though, its audio excels, and I think it’s here The Incident at Galley House properly justifies its existence as something genuinely additive to the original. This is a doomed world brought to life through wonderfully atmospheric soundscapes – from tyre wheels in thick mud and violent rain storms to crackling fireplaces and clinking cups of tea – through a synth score that switches subtly from quiet ambience to discordant nightmare. And through a stellar voice cast, which, after an appropriate bit of Radio 4 drama country house stuffiness early on, really commits to a challenging second half, when the true emotional horror of it all slowly becomes clear.
As in all good mysteries, the clues are there from the start, of course. Why were these victims never identified? Why was Galley House believed to be deserted? Why does something seem off, even from the very first scene? These kinds of non-linear narratives always feel like a bit of a magic trick to me, maintaining their shape despite their fragmentary nature, and Galley House – like Type Help before it – doesn’t just work because it’s good at making you feel smart, it works because it tells a cracking tale. It’s a gripping thriller, a period piece murder mystery, a ghost story of sorts. And once the machinations of its central enigma assert themselves, something genuinely chilling too. Sometimes Galley House – particularly in a coda overeager to explain – is a strong argument that less is more, but Evil Trout simultaneously manages to prove that more can also be more. And so, like a memory resurfacing from a clouded past, one of last year’s best mysteries becomes one of this year’s best too.
A copy of The Incident at Galley House was provided for this review by Evil Trout.