The Rise of the Golden Idol
The Award-winning detective saga returns in this standalone sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol. Uncover the truth behind 20 strange cases of crime, death and depravity in the 1970s. The world has changed dramatically - the sins of humanity have not.
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The Ratline on Steam
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A murdered priest. A secret list. Hunt Nazi fugitives across the globe in this gritty 1971 detective thriller. Analyze evidence, follow leads, and make sharp deductions before the trail goes cold. From the creators of Family, Rivals, Conspiracy, Echo Beach and Riley & Rochelle.
The Ratline is a adventure, detective and investigation game
developed and published by Owlskip Games.
Released on March 17th 2026 is available on Windows, MacOS, Steam Deck and Steam Machine
in 2 languages: English and Simplified Chinese.
It has received 337 reviews of which 273 were positive and 64 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.6 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 13.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified The Ratline into these genres:
Adventure
Detective
Investigation
Mystery
Puzzle
Atmospheric
Conspiracy
Noir
2D
Dark
Indie
Logic
Singleplayer
Story Rich
Narrative
Thriller
Here is the detailed breakdown of supported languages for The Ratline:
| UI | Subtitle | Audio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | |||
| Simplified Chinese |
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at The Ratline through various videos and screenshots.
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10 (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel Core i3-2100 / AMD FX-6300 Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti / AMD Radeon HD 7850
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 2 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX compatible sound card
MacOS
- OS: macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) or later
- Processor: 1.8 GHz Intel Core i5 or Apple Silicon (M1/M2 supported via Rosetta)
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 or equivalent
- Storage: 7 GB available space
Steam Price & Best Deals
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Solid investigate 'em up in the vein of The Roottrees Are Dead and the Golden Idol games. The UI is a bit clunky and the 'Sonitron' mechanic introduced halfway through the game is a bit contrived, but the story and puzzles are good and you get to hunt Nazis, which is always nice.
This is a solid recommendation for folks who liked Golden Idol, Roottrees, Obra Dinn, etc....with caveats Pros: Legit complex and deep connections, most of the cases were very satisfying to chew through, the finale was fun because if you've been paying attention you kinda figure it out before everything is laid out for you. Also maybe I'm broken but I kind of loved the Sonitron mechanic later in the game. Cons: Mechanics -wise this is just a mess. Not easy to close out of screens and documents. The documents are REALLY hard to read, and the game lacks a "simple text" version. The game wouldn't give me a different resolution even when I changed it in settings (on steam deck). You had to constantly click into text boxes. We didn't get a piece of evidence in case 8 apparently. So just really lacking polish in a lot of ways. Game world wise, the game doesn't really make sense? I feel the dev succeeds in making a very fun game, but the mechanics don't feed into the world / story. A rolodex that has everything you need. A library system search that only spits out relevant cases. It all felt in service of gameplay rather than story / tone / vibe, which is something that Rootrees nailed.
I consider myself pretty up to date on these archive-searching narrative deduction games. The Ratline is a love-letter to the recent boom in the genre. It’s brimming with references to giants in the field and puts its own spin on many of their investigative mechanics. If this is your jam, I give it an unqualified recommendation. HOWEVER if you’re not already familiar with the genre, the recommendation is qualified. I suspect players may struggle to make progress past the first couple of cases if they don’t understand at a glance what they’re being asked to do and what sort of inquiries are likely to be productive. If you haven’t played at least 3 of the following, I would say go try them first: [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/653530/Return_of_the_Obra_Dinn/] Return of the Obra Dinn , [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/2754380/The_Roottrees_are_Dead/] The Roottrees are Dead , [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1677770/The_Case_of_the_Golden_Idol/] The Case of the Golden Idol (and/or its [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/2716400/The_Rise_of_the_Golden_Idol/] sequel ), [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/368370/Her_Story/] Her Story , and [url=https://william-rous.itch.io/type-help] Type Help (or its forthcoming remake [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/3641000/The_Incident_at_Galley_House/] The Incident at Galley House ).
(cross posted from my Pika blog, lexplays, where it was originally posted March 24th) Last week, I played The Ratline, the new game by OwlSkip Games. It's a document-based deduction game set in the 70s, where you play as an investigator figuring out the aliases of fugitive Nazis who were smuggled out of Germany and into the Americas. It was one of my favourite demos in the latest Next Fest. Naturally, I devoured the game when it came out March 17th. Here are my thoughts! The Good: The core gameplay is so engaging: In most chapters, you begin with a letter from your employer, listing the names of a few related targets and some sparse background information on them. You're then tasked with figuring out the current alias and location of each target, and providing an image of their face. Finally, you're provided with a few photographs or documents that have some connection to your targets. From there, the main way you get more evidence is every millennial's worst nightmare: picking up the phone and calling strangers. (Thankfully, the protagonist, Saul Perlman, does all the talking; you only have to choose which topics to ask about in which order). In practice, this means you inspect the evidence you have for visible company names, place names, etc., and look those up in your Rolodex. If you find a number for the given company (and sometimes you won't), you dial them up. Usually someone will answer, and if they're friendly enough, they might send some extra photos or documents your way after you finish your call, and the cycle continues. Of course, it won't always be quite this straightforward to figure out who to call. You might need to track down a corporate restructuring proposal to figure out which restaurant in a given city falls under their umbrella; you may need to scour your Rolodex for companies with the same area code; you may even need to compare a map with a picture to figure out where you'd have to be located to take that photo at all. Thankfully, you have access to a database that might come in handy. Using the database involves some suspension of disbelief, as it only includes the documents that you need to solve the case; there's an unintended humour involved in searching a major city's name and hearing that the New York Public Library has no results. What really makes this gameplay sing for me is the connections between the different chapters: you might find some evidence in Chapter 1 that takes on new meaning in Chapter 3. The game allows you to pin any document you've found to your board at any time, avoiding the slog of constantly scrolling through a pile of old evidence, and letting you enjoy your eureka moment in peace. I was happy to discover that premise of tracking down Nazis isn't just set dressing; the game very much has something to say about power, accountability, and (perhaps most importantly) American imperialism. I won't give away late game twists, but if you're familiar at all with the real history of the ratlines, you'll be able to guess where we're headed. There is real anger in this game, and that anger focuses and elevates the narrative. There are a lot of stories that use Nazis as the villains, not because they want to engage with the evil of Nazism on any profound level, but because they serve as universally agreed upon bad guys, and allow you to write a good vs evil story that is functionally apolitical*. The Ratline isn't one of them. The Bad: The game falls into a trap that's not uncommon in this genre: introducing convoluted mechanics in the last few hours in a seeming attempt to keep gameplay fresh. There's a mechanic added in the last handful of cases that is both annoyingly complicated to use and frustratingly immersion-breaking. The core gameplay of The Ratline was very strong, but the late addition suggests a lack of confidence in that gameplay's ability to carry the story through to the end, and ironically, ends up weakening the game as a result. There are a few deductive leaps the game asks the player to make that are just a bit too ambitious. Thankfully, the game has a robust hint system, but the moments I had to use it were frustrating. There were also places where I made connections hours before the game asked me to do so. All of this is fairly common in this genre, of course, but it nonetheless detracted from my enjoyment. Mild, mechanical discussion of the final chapter ahead: there are only a handful of pieces of evidence for you to find here, and the game clearly intends you to find them in a specific order. I accidentally found the last piece of evidence first, which gave the entire game and mystery away before I even knew what I was looking for; it refers to the other evidence in the chapter, explains all the deductions you might have to make in explicit detail, and is narratively meant to be found last. Needless to say, this took the wind out of my sails, and meant I ended the game on a very sour note. I'm hoping the developer can patch the game so you can't find the last piece of evidence until you've found the other two, for the sake of future players; there's nothing worse in this type of game than being deprived of the chance to use your brain. On the whole, I really did enjoy the game, which took me a little under eight hours to complete. If you're a fan of Return of the Obra Dinn, the Golden Idol games, or The Roottrees are Dead, I recommend checking it out. The demo is still available, and covers the first three chapters. Thanks for reading! * Two caveats: obviously, Nazism was and is political; and their status as uncontroversial bad guys is much less true today than it was ten years ago, which is of course horrifying and depressing. What I mean by "functionally apolitical" is that a lot of media that has used Nazis as villains is uninterested in anything about the Nazis except their ability to serve as, like, a historical orc, a real-world Klingon. Review originally posted [url=https://lexplays.pika.page/posts/mini-review-the-ratline] here .
There is a lot to like about this game. Of the games in the "Obra-likes", it resembles The Roottrees Are Dead most closely, in that you're searching for information through phone calls and newspaper archives in order to piece together the identities of the people you're trying to find (Nazis gone to ground, in this case). Unfortunately, the UI/UX is a lot less smooth than it is in Roottrees. [*] Correct answers aren't fixed in place when you do a check, which means that if you're uncertain about more than one element, you have to swap out every combination of items (or go through the mediocre hint system for things you're "mostly sure" of) until it clicks. Since this requires typing things into a name-finding machine and then waiting for a dramatic reveal each time, it takes absolutely forever. I feel like the Obra Dinn / Golden Idol "if you get three things right you get to keep them" system would work better than this. [*] I love that you can pin evidence from previous cases -- and indeed you must do that at several key points, as facts about people you've come across earlier become newly relevant -- but hunting through your previous files is tedious, since there is no text search, so you're SOL if you are trying to remember where you've previously met someone named "Wolfgang" or whatever. [*] The editing is sloppy and the texts and dialogues are filled with typos, including in several items that you have to search on! More generally, the game feels a lot less expansive and robust than Roottrees, in that, with very few exceptions, the ONLY items that exist in your Rolodex and library searches are the exact ones needed for the mysteries. You can search on the entire-ass country of "Bolivia" and you will find exactly one document, which happens to be about the thing you're doing for that case. One of the things that made Roottrees great was that the in-world Google equivalent felt truly fleshed out -- you would be learning all kinds of trivia, not just about the Roottree family, but about the world they lived in (and the game would occasionally nudge you back to reality with "This is a fascinating disease/animal/city but there doesn't seem to be anything related to your case here" so it didn't feel like it was wasting your time). I am old enough to have spent a lot of time doing research in physical libraries, and you didn't just find One Single Page on a country when you went to the shelf. Having more "stuff" in the game would have the knock-on effect of giving you multiple ways into a problem; in this game, there's too often a single point of failure (if you didn't notice X, you're hosed for the case). Relatedly, the in-game phone calls consist of calling people around the world who all speak perfect English, who work during your time zone, and who give you the specific information you ask for without any prompting or quid-pro-quo, and who never have new information or react to anything you've learned in subsequent calls. (Also, your character comes off as pretty dumb in all these calls, making it even more mystifying why people (who are often in a lot of personal danger!!) are falling all over themselves to help him.) "I took a photo of this extremely dangerous guy doing something shady, I'll send it right along!" And then suddenly you have it, at Internet speed, in 1971. With a couple of exceptions, specifically hilarious shout-outs to the games that inspired this one , there is nothing "extra" in your rolodex, so if you call the "wrong" cafe you don't, e.g., have a fun conversation with a barista who says "oh, she doesn't work here but she used to" in order to make the world feel more lived-in and give the player multiple ways to find the information they need. I feel like Roottrees really excelled at this. So yeah, it all felt very stilted and artificial at points, as the Cold War setting conflicts with the player's need to have all the documents to hand for the case. I'm not sure how to solve this problem, but it made the game feel quite "puzzle-y" and less like an actual investigation. I do want to end on a positive note since there's a lot of good stuff here. A few of the cases (not all of them, sadly) are really terrific and satisfying to solve. The art is top-notch -- very loose and comic-like illustrations, but with enough personality and detail to trace characters across years, and to provide a great A-Ha! feeling when you see someone you're looking for lurking in a photo. The ending is great, though I agree with other commenters that it would be even better if there were some kind of consequence to choosing one path or another . And finally, bringing Nazis to justice is a good feeling. I just wish the game had some more polish; maybe in a few patches it will. P.S. ignore my recorded playtime, I kept my computer running overnight for a couple of nights. I'd say that for an experienced puzzler, Ratline would take between 5-10 hours to finish.
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Frequently Asked Questions
The Ratline is currently priced at 13.99€ on Steam.
No, The Ratline is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 13.99€ on Steam.
Yes, The Ratline received 273 positive votes out of a total of 337 achieving a rating of 7.56.
😊
The Ratline was developed and published by Owlskip Games.
Yes, The Ratline is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Yes, The Ratline is playable and fully supported on MacOS.
No, The Ratline is not playable on Linux.
Yes, The Ratline is playable on Steam Deck, though it might require a few minor tweaks. Make sure to check the Steam store page and community feedback on ProtonDB for exact compatibility details.
Yes, The Ratline is playable on Steam Machine, though it might require a few minor tweaks. Make sure to check the Steam store page and community feedback on ProtonDB for exact compatibility details.
No, The Ratline does not support VR.
The Ratline is a single-player game.
No, The Ratline does not currently offer any DLC.
No, The Ratline does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
No, The Ratline does not support Steam Remote Play.
Yes, The Ratline is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for The Ratline.
Data sources
The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.
Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 10 October 2026 07:07 UTC |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 02 October 2026 09:13 UTC |
| Steam price | 15 October 2026 14:31 UTC |
| Steam reviews | 15 October 2026 09:57 UTC |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about The Ratline, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about The Ratline
- SteamCharts - Analysis of The Ratline concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck The Ratline compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
3
Developer
Owlskip Games
Publisher
Owlskip Games
Release
17 Mar 2026
Platforms