The Ratline now open on Steam

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Demo also available for deduction-style Nazi war criminal mystery on Windows and Mac

A ratline may sound like a row of rodents, but in Owlskip Games' newly released deduction-style mystery by that name, it refers to the crucial but covert means of rooting out an entirely different kind of vermin for good. 

It's 1971, and a Catholic priest is found murdered in cold blood in a Budapest church. A terrible tragedy... or is it? Perhaps not, as it leads to "the discovery of a secret list naming Nazi fugitives who escaped justice through a covert network known as The Ratline." It's an invaluable piece of information, and it falls to an unlikely hero to follow up – namely Saul Perlman, a "struggling detective" living in a leaky apartment in Queens, New York with his pet dog and is looking for just "one last case." When "tasked with uncovering the truth behind these disappearances," the hunt for Nazis begins in earnest. As Saul begins "chasing shadows across continents," players must use their "wits, intuition, and network of contacts to follow leads, dig through documents, and piece together the truth – before the trail goes cold forever."

That may sound a like an epic globetrotting mystery, and indeed the search will see players "working contacts and shaking down sources from Rome to Buenos Aires." However, The Ratline is less a traditional point-and-click adventure and more of a slideshow-styled "search-and-deduce detective game in the vein of The Case of the Golden Idol, Return of the Obra Dinn, The Roottrees Are Dead, and Type Help." Here you'll rely primarily on your pinboard, your wits and an extensive, ever-growing database of clues. With these you'll gradually "piece together fragmented evidence by examining documents, deciphering codes, analysing photographs, and interpreting subtle slips of the tongue to identify and track" your suspects. The game refuses to hold players' hands, so success depends on "logic and observation rather than guidance or solution markers." There are optional hints available when necessary, but even with those, your cases "can only be solved by connecting evidence and thinking critically."

The game features a stylized hand-painted presentation, but don't let its cartoony aesthetic fool you, as it belies some very dark subject matter in this "gritty 1971 detective thriller" about greed and corruption. The cases and characters may be fictional, but the developers have drawn on "extensive research into real-world Nazi escape networks after World War II," giving the game an important "historical grounding [that] provides context and credibility" to your investigations. As you progress, the gameplay will introduce "new investigative mechanics" to keep things fresh, but ultimately to "hunt down your marks" you'll still need to "put together their identities, check your work and bring them to justice."

If you're ready to ID fugitive war criminals, you can take the job right away as The Ratline is now available on Steam for Windows Mac. Alternatively, you can try your hand at the first three cases provided in the playable demo.