The machine before me looks like Frankenstein's homebrew version of Guess Who. Its main panel is composed of three rows of portraits. Some show men in 1930s suits, others women in flapper dresses, still more are simply blue people-shaped silhouettes. Below each portrait is a simple on/off switch. To the left of the portraits is a slide selector alongside a list of locations. Above that is a radio dial and filament lights indicating a current setting. At the bottom of the machine is a readout displaying a cryptic code '01-QU-1-11'. And, to the right, most enticing of all, is a big red lever.

It may not be much to look at, but calibrated correctly, this machine lets me hear the dead. It's a good thing, too, because there are plenty of corpses at Galley House.

I will try to avoid any spoilers and only use screenshots from the games opening half hour. Though, as with other deduction games such as Her Story and TR-49, The Incident At Galley House is a game best played blind. If you like those games, I can recommend this, though I have some reservations you may want to read after playing through the game for yourself.

The Incident At Galley House opens with you arriving at a boarded up manor. An aged newspaper in your bag reveals that on a March evening in 1936, multiple people staying in the home turned up dead. While some showed an obvious cause of death – a gunshot here, a heavy fall there – for most of the victims it remains a mystery.

I found the first hour of The Incident At Galley House enthralling. As I deciphered the workings of the machine and began to discover new characters and locations within the house, I found thread after thread to be followed through the events of the evening. Each correctly deduced code gave me a thrill. My notepad filled with scribbled clues to follow up, as there were so many they threatened to be forgotten. I hopped about the timeline trying to grasp the contours of the night, unsure if I had found all of the characters. But then that flurry petered out and the action shifted to become more methodical and, at times, tedious.

Once you have worked out the dimensions of the mystery by locating all the rooms and meeting all the characters, you are now focused on tracing their movements across the evening to make sure there is no point in their night you've missed. There thrils shifted for me to feel more like box-ticking than mystery solving. It doesn't help that while some of those scenes open up new lines of inquiry, several are simply a character stood on their own, talking to themselves or lying in bed.