The Incident at Galley House

The Incident at Galley House is an investigation game, where the player has to discover the cause of "the incident" using a special machine that can let its user see and hear moments from the past. It is considered to be a remake of the browser-game Type Help from by William Rous, who is also one of the developers credited on this game.

What I Didn't Like

Assumed Choice (Probably a bug)

I am not going to elaborate on this, as I realize this is something that will probably get patched in the very near future. Plus, the bug is tied to spoilers and an an achievement.

What I will say is that the bug stems from a design choice where the player gets the option to name something as they wish, but the developers clearly expected you to name it a certain way.

We figured it out eventually, but it was a little frustrating to not be rewarded for figuring that out early on because of what appears to be bug.

The Ending

First off, I respect the way the designers chose to write the ending this game. It just wasn't for me as when it comes to mystery games like this, I like when the ending reveals something or you have a big "ah-ha" moment when it all comes together.

This one doesn't though. It has an ending, and you get to understand a bit of the mystery, but I found the way they wrapped the game didn't satify the curiousity I had developed throughout the game.

Again-- that is a choice that I respect. I just prefer something a little different.

What I Liked

Different Deduction Methods

Investigation games like this, where you are limited to a single interface (in this case the special machine), the only real variety you can give the player is in the clue to leave them to follow.

While playing through, we found that there were different ways to think about the clues which led us to plenty of moments of feeling very clever.

I really like feeling clever. It feels good.

Pacing

There were seldom times where I felt bored or stuck with this game, and I feel that is because of the pacing.

I play these games with my partner, who enjoys sifting though the details to find all the clues we can, but I'm not quite that person. I'm the kind of person that will continue to sift, as long as I get something to reward all my sifting.

In these types of games there can be dry spells where you only get small clues or dead-ends. In Galley House, I found that those moments were few and far between. I would even argue that when things slowed down, that was a sign that we needed to think about things differently.

Whether that was by design or by chance, I really liked the fact that I never got blocked for long.

Final Investigation

In The Roottrees are Dead, there was an entire second chapter that expanded on the original. I found that to be too much. After the first chapter, I was done. The second chapter just felt like it was dragging on.

For Galley House, the second chapter is very well timed and feels more like a boss level rather than an extension of the game. It has plenty of great moments that I will not elaborate on for the sake of spoilers, but I really enjoyed it.

The Conclusion

I never played Type Help, but it was clearly worth remaking.

I could feel the fingerprints of The Roottrees are Dead on this experience, but only the good parts. In fact, I would say that Galley House feels like an evolution on Roottrees, for both gameplay and writing.

For such a spooky theme, they never fell into using tropes like jump scares. Everything was very cerebral, which is what I expect out of a great investigation game-- which Galley House most definitely is.