The Incident at Galley House is a mystery worth remembering

The Incident at Galley House is a spectacular whodunit that stands alongside the Agatha Christie novels it's inspired by, namely And Then There Were None. There is a certain cohort of people who will read that sentence, close this review, and go boot up Galley House. I am one of them. But for those who aren't deep in a Poirot re-read era, or find the late-1930s aristocratic murder mystery abrasive or uninteresting, Galley House builds upon decades of whodunits and murder mysteries to make something truly unique and terrifying.

Like any great detective story, let us start at the beginning. You play as a young woman in vaguely modern times, arriving at Galley House, a boarded-up manor house that was the site of an unsolved mystery in the late 1930s. Armed with a magical time-replaying device, it's your job to step through the last 24 hours of the people at Galley House, figure out what happened here, and solve the mystery. You must determine the identity of each household member and track their whereabouts using deductive reasoning.

There are over ten characters to track across more than twenty time points and fifteen different locations in the manor house. To make the machine function properly, you'll need to deduce exactly which characters are in which room at which time. If you get it wrong (and you will...a lot), the machine will grumble at you; but if you get it right, you'll be rewarded with a scene between those characters that will provide more clues about other scenes. You'll hear someone play the piano during a scene, and, knowing the piano is in the Living Room, you'll begin trying to sort out who is playing the piano at this time in the living room (spoilers: it's probably the woman who was playing piano earlier for fun).

As the story goes on—and the body count rises—the mystery begins to click into place; you'll quickly start locking in scenes in rapid succession as you barrel towards the conclusion. After hours of setup, superb character writing and voice acting, and mounting tension, I found myself experiencing the same page-turner tendencies of a good whodunit: somehow I, the detective(!), still didn't know who was to blame, but I needed to know.

And then the power goes out.

To really explain how much I love Galley House, I'm going to have to ruin a bit of it for you. So, if you have any desire to play a seemingly supernatural whodunit that, I think, is one of the best logical deduction mystery games to come out this year, go wishlist or download it. The Incident at Galley House is a well-crafted puzzle box that stands beside the greats, while somehow managing to be something wholly unique.

The Incident at Galley House is as much an Agatha Christie novel as it is an Edgar Allan Poe one. The hallmark of most (all?) Poirot and Holmes stories is that the supernatural is not real, logic will always prevail. Those are not some bestial supernatural Hounds on the moors, they can be rational explained away.

Not so with Galley House.

Galley House is haunted. Galley House remains haunted even as you attempt to solve the great mystery of the past. The first death in Galley House is discovered in the study: an unknown man has simply died there, his body discovered by the Patroness of the house and someone invited to the home by a man that doesn't exist. An odd start to the evening, but everyone seems to take it in stride...a bit too well.

It's not until a few more bodies appear—again, something that goes over surprisingly well with the visitors at Galley House—that you, the player, begin to realize something is going on here. People are dying and those alive in the house forget they even existed. Wives forget their husbands and sisters forget each other at the exact moment they die, sometimes mid-sentence. There is a thunderclap, then that person is simply removed from their memory forever, the body simply appearing. And, once a member of the house manages to remember who a previously dead person is, they too drop dead.

The great magic trick of Galley House is when you discover the memory murder virus never went away.

Throughout the game, you'll hit major milestones in solving the mystery of Galley House, then, frustratingly, the generator powering your machine will go out. Each time the machine goes out, you wind up the generator, then return to your work, a new document with new clues magically placed on your console.

You see, the great magic trick of Galley House is when you discover the memory murder virus never went away. You assume that you arrived at Galley House alone, you assume it's a faulty generator, you assume those new documents are just gameplay reveals. You are wrong.

Galley House's second act is not a grand parlor reveal scene, it is the reveal that your crew, brought to Galley House for a purpose, has all died through the same mysterious, supernatural means. You simply have forgotten all your friends existed. The memory machine you've been using to solve the mystery from decades ago, takes on a new, morbid use: discovering in almost real time, how your cadre of friends have died. You'll relive moments that just happened for the first time.

The grand mystery of Galley House isn't whodunit, but, instead, how does all of this works. What are the mechanics of the memory virus? And, how do you end it?

The cast of Galley House is a phenomenal array of classic mystery archetypes (the drunk floozy, the sullen veteran, the passed over second son, etc.), but what is most striking is how well realized each character is. There is a certain expected amount of stereotyping that happens in mysteries of this era, rendering characters as one-note participants in a mystery, not people with exterior lives. Galley House steps outside this trope, expanding on character details and relationships that only make the memory loss more devastating. I wasn't rooting for almost any of these characters, but the unraveling relationship of Annie and Vic is a particularly affecting one.

There is a mania and despair that falls over Galley House by the end—in both timelines—that is something you rarely see in detective fiction. That mania is infectious as each flick of the magic memory machine switch tiptoes your player character closer and closer to the edge. Your team, sent here to investigate Galley House, understand the mechanics of how the memory virus works...and yet, they are helpless.

The Incident at Galley House is one of my favorite games from this year and, if you enjoy an inventive take on the classic detective tale, I suspect you'll enjoy it as well. And, while I've spoiled one of the major twists of the game, I do think there is enough here to still be a riveting adventure; the interpersonal conflicts and the puzzle mechanics are both extremely satisfying.