The Incident at Galley House [REVIEW] – An Enthralling Time-Twisting Mystery

There’s nothing quite like a good old mystery to sink your teeth into, especially when a game steps back and gives you the freedom to actually do all of the detective work yourself. The Incident at Galley House certainly puts the impetus on the player to use all of their smarts to get to the bottom of its unsettling case, but believe me, its unique approach to puzzle-solving makes for an utterly enthralling investigation that I simply couldn’t step away from.

Check out some screenshots down below:

The setup of The Incident at Galley House is instantly compelling: you play as a modern-day investigator poking around a grand, condemned manor house, where you’re tasked with figuring out what exactly happened there on a grim night in 1936 that ended with eleven unidentified bodies scattered across the property. It’s unsettling, it’s dark, but it’s also captivating, with the expert storytelling ensuring that you won’t be able to leave the mystery unsolved.

One thing that’s worth noting from the get-go is that the bulk of the gameplay revolves around a rather peculiar machine that lets you look back into the past to view the events of that fateful night, so yeah, it’s pretty unconventional. However, what makes this engaging is the fact that things aren’t as simple as pressing a play button and watching the tragedy unfold, but instead, you have to actively hunt for the memories. To pull up a scene, you have to input three bits of data into the machine: a specific time code from a chronological timeline, the room where the event took place, and the numbers assigned to the people who were present.

“The Incident at Galley House is a fantastic, head-scratching deduction experience that’ll genuinely make you feel like one of the world’s most esteemed mystery-solving sleuths when you get to the bottom of it.“

It’s within this system that the core deduction loop really, really shines. You have to pay close attention to every little bit of dialogue and environmental clue if you want to get to the bottom of the mystery, especially since you need to know where someone is at any time and, more importantly, when they’re going to be there. Here’s a piece of advice: have a pen and paper handy, especially since a lot of time is spent simply trying to pinpoint where exactly people were and what exactly they were doing.

Because you explore these scenes out of order, you spend a lot of time working backwards and forwards, using information from the end of the night to figure out what was happening earlier on. There are plenty of oddities to throw you off along the way too, and when you think you have something figured out, don’t be surprised to find yourself barking up the wrong tree. But believe me, it makes for a compelling experience, and whilst it can be a little daunting at first, it all clicks into place very quickly in-game – especially when you start work out the who’s-who of Galley House.

Check out some screenshots down below:

It also helps that the game provides some really useful tools to help you manage the chaos of tracking everyone’s position. There is an in-game notepad that lets you save exact quotes directly from the dialogue transcripts, a keyword search function, and the ability to drop custom markers on your timeline – you can even pause a memory halfway through to highlight a crucial bit of text, whilst the interface also tells you how many undiscovered scenes are left in a given area. And when you’re completely stumped? There’s a hint system that’ll point you in the right direction.

Whilst the concept is complex, the game does a lot to ensure you’re never overwhelmed, and you know what?  It just makes the whole experience all the more rewarding. I beat the game in one sitting (that took around five hours), but I just found myself wholly engaged from start to end, eager to follow each thread of clues to get to the bottom of what was going on. It’s incredibly satisfying, and whilst the slower pace might not be for everyone, it actually made the whole thing all the more cozy for me… you know… in that grim mystery-solving kind of way.

Developer: William Rous
Publisher: Evil Trout
Platform(s): PC (Reviewed)
Website: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3641000/The_Incident_at_Galley_House/