The Ratline lets you hunt down ex-Nazis hiding in plain sight – demo available now

Sometimes you get a note through the door, nestled among the bills and flyers for local takeaways. A priest's been murdered, and you need to track down the ex-Nazis he smuggled out of Germany after the war. It's the 1970s – what else have you got going on?

That's the setup for The Ratline from Owlskip Games – the Steam Next Fest demo of which is available now.

While plenty of detective games ratchet up the murder to get you hunting for motives and bloodied knives, The Ratline keeps its focus on unmasking the identities of resettled war criminals. Each case puts a set of ex-Nazi names up on the investigation board, and it's your job to make enquiries and sift through clues to correctly pin down their current pseudonym, location, and appearance.

Are they doing dentistry in Canada? Running a cafe in London? The bloke with the dodgy hairline in the wedding photo? All of these questions flood your mind as you play – and the game will likely appeal to the same analytical minds that loved Return of the Obra Dinn.

From a practical standpoint, sorting through notes and photos has a relaxing satisfaction to it. That said, longer cases could benefit from letting you pin more than eight pieces of evidence to the board at once – it's easy to miss connections when key details are sitting out of sight in your inventory. On the plus side, The Ratline has one of the smoother phone interfaces around, with a satisfyingly chunky keypad you can pull up once you've tracked down the right number in the rolodex.

Overall, The Ratline makes a solid impression in the roughly 40-minute demo, and the full game arrives on March 17th.