Preview: The Ratline

As early as 1944, many Axis powers knew that World War II wasn’t set to end in their favour. For higher-ranking officials and Nazi sympathisers, there came a sense of dread – would the consequences of their acts finally catch up with them? With this question on their mind, many who had supported the fascist regime would seek instead to escape it, using a network of people still aligned to the cause to flee, like rats through a sewer, to South America. 

This is where The Ratline begins, tasking the player with investigating documents and sources available to them to seek out where these various escapees have fled to – at first the premise seems simple: review photos and files, find common links between them and create a profile of their new identity for your mysterious benefactor.

Unlike many mystery games of its type, the game is not as forthcoming with the answers, instead requiring lateral thinking and investigative reasoning to gain the answers you need – the first game that came to mind was The Case of the Golden Idol, a much applauded game that utilises a similar theme of matching details against the environment to piece together answers, but the critical distinction to be made is in the execution.

Where the Golden Idol games give the player a library of words to match into a statement and rely on their environmental deductions to complete each scenario, The Ratline leans closer towards a more grounded and open-ended approach, giving the player no footholds to start the climb with the single exception of the basic evidence that you are given.

These clues alone will never be enough to help you work out the identities of each escapee, as you will need to use other tools at your disposal to increase your understanding of the situations at hand – this can include seeking out obscure information such as company names in photos or an organisation alluded to in a letter, calling them and enquiring about your current target.

Each clue becomes another rabbit hole to tumble down, giving you new information and sometimes providing unreliable knowledge, such as a previous location that may be inaccurate – something you will only find out by looking deeper into the situation.

By the end of each investigation you will have a forename, surname, general location and recent headshot of the current target to submit to your employer, which the game will verify for you in a manner once again akin to the Golden Idol series, stressing roughly how many errors there are and urging you to look back over the evidence.

One thing The Ratline manages to do effectively is the execution of its puzzles, both as self-contained pieces, but also as elements of a larger puzzle. Very little exposition is given at the start, with only a baseline understanding of the subject and the pretence that a priest has been murdered in connection with the ratlines; this is enough to spur our character on as they delve deeper into each case, with a radio reminding you of the game’s early 70s feel at one end of the room and a very comfortable dog at the other – and yes, you can pet the dog.

As much as The Ratline can be praised for its dedication to letting the player run free – with the developers’ vision of a game with no “hand-holding” squarely at the forefront of this experience – it can also mean some frustration as the game progresses. There’s a strong reliance on using both the current and previous evidence to help piece together the wider picture which, although impressive in microcosm, leads to the fear that on a larger scale it could become tangled and messy, requiring the player to remember and record details they may have forgotten previously.

It’s not uncommon for games to expect the player to utilise their knowledge and experience outside of the game to their benefit – indie darling Fez was notorious for hiding meta clues in the game, requiring the use of QR codes or oblique hints to decode (sometimes literally) the solution to a puzzle; more recently, Blue Prince leaned into this need for players to use resources outside of the game, even explicitly encouraging players to use a notepad to record findings and observations.

A notepad may not be a necessity for The Ratline (though certainly something that may come in handy); it begs the question of whether the game will be able to deliver on the promises it makes without overwhelming players. At first glance the game definitely shows promise, offering the opportunity to search for the answers themselves, not relying on hints or suggestions to guide their hand, but when evidence starts to pile up and clues become messy, will it still feel as enjoyable as those early hours?

I am optimistic about the future of The Ratline following its demo, but it’s worth approaching with trepidation, especially if prospective players are not battle-hardened in deductive puzzlers; the story also serves as an engaging look through the annals of European, and indeed global, history – for years after the end of the Second World War, we were enamoured by the idea that good had prevailed and evil had been vanquished, attributing this storybook outlook to our future. Sadly, the truth was far more bleak, with many perpetrators remaining at large as late as 2023 – there’s no certainty that all who fled through the ratlines were ever found, but at least The Ratline offers a chance to learn from this historical oddity in the hopes it can never be repeated.