On Sunday the 7th of March, 1936, a group of locals walked the long and muddy track to Galley House.
As far as any of them were aware, the house had been empty for decades. What brought them there that day remains unclear.
The first thing they saw as they arrived was the body of a man in his early forties lying face-down outside the front door. The blood was still dripping down the steps.
After no one responded to their knocks, the decision was made to break in. More bodies were found as they searched. All had died recently. However, with the exception of a couple of the most recent corpses, the causes of death could not be identified.
As far as any of them were aware, the house had been empty for decades. What brought them there that day remains unclear.
The first thing they saw as they arrived was the body of a man in his early forties lying face-down outside the front door. The blood was still dripping down the steps.
After no one responded to their knocks, the decision was made to break in. More bodies were found as they searched. All had died recently. However, with the exception of a couple of the most recent corpses, the causes of death could not be identified.
— From the introduction to Type Help
Type Help is a Horror Mystery Puzzle Game by William Rous, available to play for free on itch.io
. It was inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn, Unheard, Her Story, and The Roottrees are Dead. An updated version by Evil Trout, The Incident at Galley House, was released on Steam on 14 July 2026.
In Type Help, the unnamed player is given a computer that contains research information about the Galley House deaths - twelve bodies found scattered around the mansion, which locals claim had been empty for decades. The previous researcher had gone through and transcribed the scenes recorded using audio recovery technology, tracking where everyone had been through the house. Unfortunately, the list of files is lost, so your primary mission is to use the information you have to find more files and determine just what happened at Galley House.
In The Incident at Galley House, you play as Reya Beckon, who arrives at Galley House with a machine which allows her to view and hear the events which happened at Galley House. Setting it up and starting the generator, she begins to determine what happened, but there are things actively happening around her that she's unaware of...or is she?
As these are mystery games, there are many spoilers in the tropes below. Efforts have been made to spoiler-tag appropriately but those particularly averse to spoilers may wish to wait until they've played the game to read the tropes. The tropes are separated into three groups: common tropes between both games, and then unique tropes for each game.
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Don't be fooled - there are no tropes in Galley House!
Tropes found in both games
- Amnesia Missed a Spot: When somebody remembers the last person who died and was forgotten, they themselves die the same way shortly thereafter.
- Anachronic Order: The scenes are not found in order, and often information from later scenes is needed to discover earlier scenes.
- Anguished Declaration of Love: The day after he loses his memories of Eve, Eddie's ends up using her engagement ring to passionately propose to his childhood friend Victoria. This causes Victoria to become the curse's next victim, as her kneejerk rejection leads to her remembering that the body she discovered in her bed this morning was actually that of her husband.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- You have the ability to associate names with each numbered character, so that you aren't looking at transcripts that just give numbers to indicate the speaker. Incident also lets you assign images to each character so you aren't just looking at human-shaped blobs with numbers.
- In Type Help, you can leave yourself a note at any time with the 'note' command, and it won't move you away from the current scene. In Incident, the notebook will pause any active scene while it's up.
- You can use 'find' to find every scene with a given word or character in it. In Incident, your previous searches are shown, along with the number of hits they had.
- The number next to each file (or, in Incident, each date or transcript) indicates how many undiscovered files can be found from the information in that file.
- Artistic License – History: Victoria and Damien are an interracial married couple (white and black African, respectively), in the UK, in an upper-class house, in 1936, and nobody bats an eye.
- Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: After being on the outs with each other all evening, Eve and Edmund's last moments together are them making up as he brings her hot cocoa and serenades her with a love song. Unfortunately, the hot cocoa reminds Eve of Thornton, who made it for her before the curse killed him.
- Be Careful What You Wish For:
- In Type Help it's implied that this is why the curse exists. It began when Eleanor Galley died and her family behaved as if she never existed. As a result, the curse made them forget she ever did - and that was just for starters.
- Incident has Ervin reject the idea that Eleanor had anything to do with the curse, but provides another example with some of the paranormal investigators who desperately wanted to solve the mysterious deaths. They all fall victim to the curse during the course of finding out. In Ervin's case, after it had already claimed everyone who ever knew him, including his wife and children.
- Birthday Party Goes Wrong: Exaggerated Trope. The gathering at Galley House is for Rupert's birthday, but nobody makes it out alive.
- Bookends: In time code 2, a doll falls from the Attic to the Entrance and almost hits John. In time code 26, John jumps to his death from the Attic, falling to the Entrance.
- Burn Baby Burn: Martha burns old pictures of her wedding in an attempt to force the "ghosts" to leave her and Eddie alone.
- Chekhov's Gun: Tony brings a gun along. It gets fired in Act 3, and again in Act 4. In neither case is it fired by Tony.
- Closed Circle: The horrible weather traps everybody inside the house.
- Curse: Oswald's theory on what's happening. He believes it's a curse caused by his family trying to pretend his sister Eleanor didn't exist after her death.
- Developing Doomed Characters: All the character development, since nobody survived.
- Driven to Suicide:
- Annie takes the gun and shoots herself in an attempt to break the curse. She is just barely too slow, but the narrator in Type Help comments that it was a clever attempt.
- John goes up to the Attic and jumps after coming to the conclusion that he murdered Annie.
- Dwindling Party: The various guests and inhabitants of Galley House all died off one by one until nobody was left, which the player gets to see play out.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: The case involves investigating a large number of deaths at Galley House. None of the characters makes it out alive. Even the investigator whose notes you're sifting through is long-dead.
- Foreshadowing:
- The introduction in Type Help and the newspaper in Incident state that only one victim was ever identified. John commits suicide and doesn't die from the curse, so he isn't Ret-Gone like everybody else. Also, you only see 11 numbered people in normal play, so this hints that there's a person 12; the very first victim, Rupert.
- There is a very subtle hint about how the curse works in the very first scene with the working class visitor and the butler after the former gets his car stuck in the mud. Initially, the visitor complains that he hopes "Rupert" knows how much trouble he's causing him, and he's quite grouchy with the butler. Then there's a thunderclap, and his demeanour shifts ever so slightly, becoming more unsure and deferential. You probably won't think much of this, until you take time period and class into account: it's very unlikely that a working class man would refer to an aristocrat by his first name unless they were very familiar with each other. If Rupert were a stranger, the visitor would refer to "Lord Galley" or "Mr Galley." When he gets to the house itself, he's constantly apologising and trying to make himself as unobtrusive as possible. That's because after Rupert's death, he went from a guest who knew the host to a lower-class stranger intruding on an upper-class family. It's no wonder he finds himself questioning why the heck he even answered the invitation: it's far more likely that he would have written off the invitation as a mistake if Rupert was truly unknown to him.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Annie attempts to do this once she catches onto the truth of the curse, thinking that if she kills herself first, she won't be forgotten and her mom won't be at risk of accidentally "remembering" her... only for the curse to activate just as she shoots herself, dooming both John and Katherine.
- It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: John Hobbes arrives to Galley House in the middle of a terrible storm, and is only taken in because the Galleys are convinced that it would be the height of impropriety to turn him away in such weather. The storm initially causes the thunderclaps that sound when the curse has claimed a victim to be written off as nothing more than bad weather; it's only when the they continue to sound once the storm has passed that everyone realizes that something is very wrong.
- Knowledge-Based Progression: The game is about solving the deaths of several people using "audio". While you do have access to every file from the start, you have to learn the game's unique file structure to navigate to them and gain information from each of the recordings.
- Last Lousy Point: The distant thunder is somebody dying elsewhere in town; you need to find the scene where it happens. An update made this more clear, but there's still a fair amount of deduction involved in finding the right file.
- Meta Twist: The game starts like you're trying to solve a stereotypical Agatha Christie style murder mystery, like And Then There Were None. You soon realize that there's something much...odder going on. Also, nobody is actually murdered. The curse kills everyone but John, who commits suicide.
- Mind Virus: The curse is basically one of these, as it causes everyone to forget the latest victim... And once someone finds something which allows them to remember the victim, they become the next victim, dying with the thunderclap.
- Morning Sickness: Victoria commiserates with Helen over it; she hasn't told Damian yet that she's pregnant.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Thanks to their nature as "audio transcripts", the player is never made privy to how the curse causes people to die beyond the telltale thunderclap when it happens. The player similarly never sees the bodies of the characters killed, only knowing they're there by the other characters' horrified reactions.
- Pensieve Flashback: The entire game involves looking back at events that happened at Galley House. The audio recovery technology was able to recover the sound around all the characters starting a few minutes before the first death. In Incident, you eventually move forward to events which are much more recent... As in, events which literally are happening while you're playing the game.
- Ret-Gone: The primary effect of the curse. When somebody dies, everybody immediately forgets them - their own spouse or relative can look right at the body and not recognize them, and their memories will adapt to fill in the gaps. When Helen dies in a room full of people including her own son, everyone forgets that she was alive just seconds earlier and acts like they just found a stranger's body. However, the curse does not affect physical evidences like photographs, but it does effect the memories of those who had seen them, making them believe the documents and photos didn't have those affected by it until after they've been claimed.
- Riddle for the Ages: It remains a mystery how the curse began. The original Type Help suggests that it started with Eleanor Galley when her parents refused to speak of her after her death, behaving as though she never existed before the curse made them forget her entirely, but Ervin Dolsky contests that origin for the curse in the remake. The earliest occurrence of the curse that can be seen in The Incident at Galley House is Rupert Galley finding a piano recital program and suddenly remembering Amelia West, a composer that was previously Ret-Gone (thus causing the curse to spread and kill the eleven others at Galley House in 1936), but Ervin claims to have traced it back through multiple incidents before the Galleys, and still has gotten no closer to an answer. There's also the question of how the first few "trailhead" time codes to start the player off were even discovered, though Incident seems to imply that Ervin and/or Pippa discovered them and provided them to Meg, who in turn wrote them down for Reya.
- Sanity Slippage: As the bodies start to pile up, the survivors start to act more and more erratic, especially where the gun is concerned. Aside from the inherent stress of finding corpses all over the place, the curse obliterating the memories of the dead makes them increasingly unsure of why they were visiting the house in the first place and their connection to each other. Martha is hit especially hard by this, due to her husband being erased early on.
- "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Zig-Zagged. Various clues are designed to make the player believe there's a ghost involved, including Rupert's invitation saying his new acquisition might make one there's "someone else in the house" and declaring "there are no ghosts in Galley House!", Eddie asking Vic to calm her sister down after the doll is thrown out the window potentially implying a poltergeist, and various other dialogues as the characters begin to take notice of the deaths and learn about Eleanor. In "Incident", this is further developed by the mysterious developments in the house, such as the door opening, generator shutting off, and notes appearing from nowhere. In both games, it turns out Rupert was telling the literal truth — there are no ghosts in Galley House other than metaphorical ones, but there is something supernatural happening.
- Surprise Pregnancy: Victoria is pregnant, and hasn't yet told Damien. He's talking about how much he wants it to be just "the two of us", and when she starts talking about starting a family, he says it's not the time or place to talk about that.
- Surprisingly Sudden Death: When a thunderclap sounds, somebody dies suddenly with no apparent cause and is erased from the memories of the living. It appears to be triggered by remembering the previous person who died and was forgotten.
- Ten Little Murder Victims: Subverted in the original Galley House incident. While people do die one by one, none of them are actually murdered. Played straight in the late game of Incident, where Ervin Dolskey engineers the death of most of the people there.
- Try Everything: It's possible to find files/scenes just by noting who isn't accounted for at a given time code, then trying the code for every single room they could be in. It's even easier if you know the unaccounted characters were meeting each other. This becomes easier with the Dwindling Party, since it cuts down on the possibilities, and Incident adds a handy little display for who hasn't been found.
- Unlucky Everydude: John Hobbes, our POV character and the final person to die in Galley House. A piano tuner by trade, he's completely out of his depth with the wealthy Galley family whom he barely knows, and is overall a very timid and clumsy person. Martha describes him as "The kind of person that would have a hard time telling a lie".
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Several characters seem to trigger the curse on others accidentally. John gives Thornton the key in the study, triggering Thornton's memories of Rupert Galley. Eddie brings Eve a mug of cocoa, which reminds her of Thornton, the butler who made it. Vic writes up a list of the remaining people, which ends up triggering Tony's and Oswald's deaths.
- Wedding Ring Defense: Zig-Zagged. Victoria asks why Martha wears a ring, since she isn't married, and Martha comments that she thought people would think she was stronger if she had a man in her life. Martha was married to Rupert, who dies in time code 01, and it's her real wedding ring.
Tropes found in Type Help
- Anti-Frustration Features: You can name the acts and individual time codes, and those names will show up in the list of files.
- Death by Irony: When the survivors think what's happening is ghosts, @ scoffs at the silly superstitions of people back in the day. They end up becoming a victim, and even commit suicide the same way as the final victim.
- Driven to Suicide: It's implied that the narrator hangs himself upon realizing he remembers someone killed by the curse.
- Easter Egg: The dream file, which can only be found through an offhand comment made by the narrator. It isn't necessary for solving the mystery, but it does give a clue on the narrator's identity.
- Last Lousy Point: The dream file. At one point, the investigator mentions a dream in a note. This is a reference to a hidden file, which hides the whole sordid story's last missing detail.
- Meta Twist: The nature of the unnamed "@" and their remarks become less professional and less like a plot device as the story progresses, and who they are and why they vanished and why the characters' names are hidden is also important.
- Out with a Bang: One member of a couple dies while making love to their partner.
- Posthumous Narration: The agent who transcribed and annotated the recordings died immediately afterwards.
- Trivial Title: Type Help is, effectively, the instructions for what to do after the introduction - the player is given a blank page with a text field, and should type 'help'.
- Unwinnable Joke Game: Hangman. No matter what letter is entered, there is no match.
- Withholding Their Name: The narrator keeps their name secret so that the curse ends with them; if nobody remembers them, it can't pass on further. The trope is subverted, though: his name is hidden in the italic characters in the dream poem.
Tropes found in The Incident at Galley House
- Adaptational Intelligence: In Type Help, @ figures out the curse, and kills himself to try and contain it, though he may have failed because he couldn't resist hiding his name as an Easter Egg. In Incident, his equivalent Ervin sets things up so the curse can take out everyone who knows who he is, he commits suicide, and also so a woman he doesn't know - the player character - will still know what happened without being subject to the curse.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- You can associate symbols with each time code to indicate things such as thunder claps or the piano playing.
- Pasting a file code like 01-QU-1-11 into the machine screen will set the machine to those settings.
- A file code in your notes that you've seen becomes a link that will take you to the transcript.
- Bookends: The game begins at the front door of Galley House where Reya can read the newspaper article about the Incident. The game ends at the front door as Reya burns the house, the newspaper article, and all the other evidence of what happened.
- Burn Baby Burn: At the end, Reya sets Galley House and all the evidence of the curse on fire to help end the curse. And minutes before, Ervin sets the Chapel ablaze while forcing himself to remember the second-to-last victim so he can be the final victim with his body unable to be discovered.
- Death of a Child: Ervin's two little girls are killed offscreen by the curse.
- Decomposite Character: The narrator role from Type Help becomes a characterless description of the sound effects, with certain lines given to the characters from Galley House, his role as the character who uses the machine is given to Reya, his monologue about hopefully being the last victim of the curse is given to Ervin, and the codes he gives you in narration are democratized among Lawrence, Meg, and Pippa.
- Driven to Suicide: Having determined that the curse only spreads from the last affected victim, Ervin specifically makes himself remember the victim before him so that he will be the next carrier, having set it up beforehand that it will be impossible for someone to remember him and suffer the same fate, effectively ending the curse for good.
- Dwindling Party: After tracking down all the information on the original Galley House cases, Reya learns that she didn't come to the mansion alone—there was a whole team with her that all died off one by one while she was working with the machine, until she was the only one left.
- Easter Egg:
- There's an achievement for setting two characters to have IDs 'L' and 'P' and then looking for them in Helen's room, making the search string 'HE-L-P' — you've typed "Help".
- Another achievement requires you to input a scene which only includes living people - that is to say, a scene with only Reya in it. This achievement is even called Still Alive.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: The game ends with Reya realizing she is the sole surviving member of the team gathered to investigate Galley House, the others having been claimed by the curse while she was piecing together the timeline of the original incident.
- Evolving Title Screen: After completing the game through the final timecode, the title screen changes to Galley House after being set ablaze.
- False Reassurance: In the latter part of the game, during the conversation between Ervin and Jacqueline, the former tells the latter that he has found a "solution" to continually finding dead bodies due to the curse, and intends to share it with her, as she's faced the same fate. What he's not saying is that his solution is to kill himself to prevent the curse spreading, and for this plan he needs Jacqueline to die as well.
- Foreshadowing:
- You try to open the door, finding it locked, then try again and it opens. As you do, there's a thunderclap. The curse is still active, and you will eventually have to scan for people in scenes that you yourself are in.
- Your ID number on the screen is in the same style as the ID numbers of the victims. If you try to enter that number into the machine, it says that you need admin access to do so. At some point, of course, you gain admin access and get to view the present day.
- Reya receives a warning that using the seance machine too much can result in hallucinations of the dead. This not only foreshadows Ervin's hallucinations of his dead family, especially when Pippa forcibly subjects him to a more powerful version of the seance machine, but the final sequence where Reya hallucinates Rupert Galley taking a nice portrait with his family, before all the horror occurred.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- This is what Ervin hopes his death would be as the last 'victim' of the curse so that it won't be able to spread any further due to him having no remaining emotional connections, and Reya, the only other person alive at the house, doesn't even know him.
- Minutes beforehand, Megan willingly allows herself to be taken by the curse in order to prevent it from jumping from Lawrence to Reya, meaning Ervin was able to end the curse with himself.
- Meta Twist:
- The curse is still active today and the thunderclaps heard at various points in the game, combined with the power of the machine cutting out, indicate that it has taken another victim and as such has added a new time code to the machine. You don't remember them dying because that's how the curse works.
- Throughout the game, helpful notes and additional evidence keep appearing every time the generator cuts out. At the beginning, you don't think much of this, since it's a video game — it needs to get you started somehow. You may even justify this with the possibility of an earlier researcher leaving their things behind. The notes popping up later in the night are a little more troubling, and alert players might think there's someone hiding in the shadows, dropping notes when it gets dark. In reality nobody is hiding - your team was working with you, in plain sight, and leaving the information they gathered with you as they discovered it: you just forgot they were there, since the curse picked them off one by one..
- Metaphorically True: Ervin tells Meg that the purpose of investigating Galley House is to track down a disease that affects people's memory. Given that the curse does in fact affect people's memories, and spreads from person to person, it could be considered a "disease", albeit an entirely supernatural one.
- Once More, with Clarity: During the second part of the game, when Reya is finding out what happened to her own team, the player looks through the memories of those who have died like they've been doing for the whole game. After the final thunderclap, some of these scenes are altered to account for the presence of a character who just died, Ervin. This adds completely new context as players are only now able to see his dialogue and the dialogue that the others in the scene said regarding him.
- Percussive Maintenance: When Reya tries to restart the generator a third time, cranking it up doesn't work. Meg gets it working with a good smack.
- Red Herring: Incident adds an additional part of the puzzle where the player must determine, based on context clues, the profile pictures of the guests. To make it more challenging, the machine has a handful of images depicting characters who were murdered in an unrelated inheritance dispute.
- Ret-Gone: Even more than in Type Help. You play through the game as if you're the only person there, only to find out that there were other people helping you all along. But they've all been hit by the curse, so you don't remember any of them. You can scan backwards to see conversations that you must have had in the middle of the game, but never saw before. Most clearly demonstrated with Ervin Dolskey; after his death, the player will suddenly see his presence accounted for in seance machine scenes where he wasn't there before, as a representation of how Reya's memory of those scenes was altered by the curse.
- Unreliable Narrator: The game shows you what you would remember afterwards, not what happened at the time. Since Reya is the only person to survive out of the eight who went to Galley House, this means you never see another live person in the game as Reya has forgotten about everyone else. This is also why Person 64 seems to appear out of nowhere near the end—in actuality, Reya had seen Ervin in those seances of recent events, before he actually died to the curse. When the curse struck, she forgot that Ervin had been in those seances, but the computer records and evidence now show him there—because he actually was there, all along; Reya had just been made to forget.
- Video Wills: The penultimate file is is a message from Ervin directly to Reya, explaining why he did what he did, and beseeching her to put an end to the curse once and for all.
- Wham Shot: Three:
- After completing the first four files, among the photos in your inventory is a shot of a prototype of the machine you're using. After the first time the generator dies, there's a person in the photo as well.
- After completing the timeline, there's a thunderclap and the power goes out again. When you get the power back on, there's a dead body in the room with you. A note on the body tells you to use his ID card to view time code 31, when he died.
- After seemingly completing the present day timeline, there's one final thunderclap and the power goes out again. After restoring the power, not only has a new ID has been added to the machine, but both the list of IDs and the photo have a new person in it.