While I spent much of 2025 obsessed with Blue Prince, PC Gamer’s ‘best design’ GOTY award winner, it wasn’t the only killer puzzle game to release near the beginning of last year. The Roottrees are Dead, a game mostly spent sitting at a computer (yours, and also a virtual one) sussing out what happened to a sprawling family. It’s not the first game to use that sort of interface to cast you as the sleuth with a dense mystery to solve, but it was enough of a hit to immediately spawn imitators.
Developer Evil Trout, meanwhile, has been working on its own follow-up, and it looks like it’s going to be a hit, too. The Incident at Galley House, released on Tuesday, has already pulled in more than 600 Steam reviews with an overwhelmingly positive 97% of them giving it a thumbs up.
If just over a year’s turnaround strikes you as suspiciously fast to design two great puzzle games, you’ve got good instincts. Both The Roottrees are Dead and The Incident at Galley House actually started as visually simplistic browser games released on Itch.io.
“At some point, Evil Trout, another developer reached out to me through Discord and mentioned he thought it should be a full, paid project,” Roottrees designer Jeremy Johnston wrote on Itch last year. “He and I collaborated to make that happen, with me doing design work and writing extra content, and him handling coding and building the game itself.
“The remake turned out incredible, and with how much fun we had making it we decided we wanted to work together again. When it came time to figure out what to work on next a lot of ideas swirled around, but almost as if by fate, another free mystery game was coming onto the scene. It was also posted to itchio and even cited Roottrees as an inspiration.”
That game, titled Type Help, was a purely text-based mystery from developer William Rous. PC Gamer contributor Abbie Stone listed it as one of the nine games that proved 2025 was the best year ever for the detective genre. “You’ll endure that deliberately frustrating interface for both the rush of those deductions and to get more of its gripping story that would be an all-time great detective yarn in any medium,” she wrote last December. “Fingers crossed the upcoming remake can retain the stripped-back magic of 2025’s finest detective game.”
Watch On
Safe to say the collaboration between Rous, Johnson, and Evil Trout has worked out pretty well, judging by the reception on Steam. It’s no longer a straightforward text game, with a visual novel-style presentation that includes 2D illustrations, a “mysterious 3D interface for navigating memories” and voice acting. You can read more about the collaboration in a nice, in-depth interview over at Games Industry.
I didn’t get sucked into The Roottrees are Dead the way I did Blue Prince, but I’m here for a wave of detective games that credit the masterful Return of the Obra Dinn as their inspiration—especially when they clearly have ideas of their own.
The Incident at Galley House is $20 (£17.75) on Steam, though with a 10% launch discount until July 21.
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