The Ratline

The Ratline is a detective game about hunting down Nazis in the 1970s. You must use photos, documents, phone calls, and library research to uncover the new identities they’ve adopted after the war. The game’s complex, interconnected cases balance database investigation with logical deduction.

You play a private investigator who gets a mysterious phone call in the middle of the night offering you a job tracking down former Nazis who were never brought to justice. In the decades since the war, they’ve changed their names, moved to different countries, and begun new lives, but they’ve left behind a paper trail that makes it possible to reconstruct who they are. This being the 1970s, your tools are limited: you begin the case with a letter describing the missing persons and sometimes a few photos or documents. You can look businesses up in a Rolodex and make telephone calls, and you can search a library database to find more documents.

Once you’ve found all the relevant documents, you can solve the deduction portion of the game. To identify each suspect, you must correctly fill in their first name, last name, current location, and portrait. Depending on the case, you may either know their real name and be looking for their current alias or vice-versa. There is no masterlist of all the names, so guessing by a process of elimination won’t cut it — you have to use logic to deduce what name you’re looking for.

While you are given one case at a time, each of which requires identifying two or three Nazis, the cases aren’t purely stand-alone. They increasingly mesh together as the game goes on, and the key detail to one case may turn out to be in an earlier case. Many of the Nazis have joined secret police organizations in South America and are still plotting and organizing. It’s up to you to put a stop to them.

A generous hint system is there to assist you if you get stuck. There are hints to help you find the right documents, and once you have them all, there are individual hints for each answer field to help you out with whatever name or picture you’re stuck on.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.