Are you peckish for a certain kind of non-linear investigation game where you uncover a mystery through discovering past events through a jumbled up chronological order? Do you want to experience that same high as Her Story? This new game by Evil Trout, based on a William Rous’ fantastic free text adventure Type Help (available on itch.io), should pique your interest.
The Incident At Galley House occured in 1930s England, where an empty house was visited by a group of people, only for them to ended up dead in mysterious circumstances. The case was closed and unsolved. But thanks to a peculiar machine, you can pick up the pieces and maybe uncover how all these people ended up dead. The game has a content warning.
Gameplay in The Incident At Galley House is mostly comprised on how you interact with this machine, which can play back audio from the incident should you input the right timeline code, room, and people who are at the scene. A few hints will get you to start, but from then on, you’ll have to listen to conversations, pick up on hints and clues of what had happened prior to the scene or what might happen next in the timeline, and use your deduction skills to find the next code that unlocks a new scene. Or just blindly guess through brute force but where’s the fun in that?
There’s also the element of guessing who the characters are. There’s a number of people at the Galley House that fateful night, and the machine you operate doesn’t automatically detect who’s who, so it’s on you to identify and cross-examine each person.
The Incident At Galley House is billed as either a remaster (as per the Steam Store page) or a reimagined version of Type Help (as per the description on Type Help’s itch.io page). The Incident At Galley House features all-new visuals with a visual novel styling to it illustrated by Henning Ludvigsen (the same illustrator behind 2023 video game adaptation of the board game Clue, a whodunnit murder mystery), fully voiced dialogues, new mechanics and a built-in hints system.
The story and mechanics are all based on Type Help, albeit with some changes. Instead of having to input through the text parser a specific format of input, The Incident at Galley House makes it so that you’re adjusting knobs and levers on a machine, as an example. But if you played through Type Help already, you can expect that most of the story is similar, to a certain point.
Type Help is a big deal among the community of mystery game players, ranking #2 on the Interactive Fiction Database and was nominated for Excellence In Narrative at the 2026 IGF award.
The Incident At Galley House is developed by Evil Trout, who previously released another non-linear mystery investigation game, The Roottrees Are Dead, which also began its life as an itch.io free game. The original Type Help is directly inspired by The Roottrees Are Dead as well as previously mentioned Her Story, Return Of The Obra Dinn, and Unheard.
The folks of Evil Trout are fans of Type Help, and offered William Rous to create The Incident At Galley House. Rous is involved with this new release, contributing to its design, writing and also providing feedback.
If you prefer a different kind of murder mystery investigation game, there’s another new indie release that might pique your interest.
The Incident At Galley House is waiting for you to uncover it, available now on PC (Steam).