One of my favorite things you can do in a video game is solve a good mystery. Unfortunately, aside from some notable exceptions, this mostly just involves adding some clue items to your inventory and then having the character explain the conclusion to you, whether you would have figured it out or not. The Roottrees are Dead provides the true detective experience, combining the best elements of Her Story and Return of the Obra Dinn to create another addition into the pantheon of great puzzle games that test your deduction skills.
Originally, The Roottrees are Dead was created as part of a game jam and released for free as a browser game by Jeremy Johnston (which is still available on itch.io). The new remastered release on Steam was created in conjunction with Robin “Evil Trout” Ward and features tons of improvements alongside an entirely new story. The AI-generated art of the game jam version has been replaced by hand-drawn illustrations by Henning Ludvigsen, and the game now features full voice acting and a robust hint system.
The Roottrees are Dead opens in 1998 with a newscast talking about a fatal plane crash involving the titular family, whose patriarch is the head of an international candy company. As the rest of the family plunges into chaos to figure out who will succeed the deceased president, you get a knock at your door from a shadowy figure who asks you to help fill out the Roottree family tree in order to help make sense of the power vacuum at the company. You’re given a little bit of information from the jump, giving you just enough of a starting point to use the 90s-style internet search engine to track down all the leads.
Most of the game involves switching between a few extremely important screens that are located around your fully-modelled 3D room. The first, and most important, is the family tree, which features 50 people for you to fill in information about. In addition to filling in their name and occupation, you’ll also need to find a picture of them for your entry to be considered complete. In order to do this, you’ll need to search the ‘internet’ for key terms to find documents relevant to the family. Specificity is important in your searches, as any keywords that are too broad will not yield any results. Occasionally during your search, you’ll find more substantial evidence, which will be ‘printed out’ and placed on another screen for you to further examine.
While it sounds like this should be easy and straightforward, especially since you’re given all the possible names for the family members, the game still finds ways to require deduction skills to put together every little piece of information. In order to get answers locked in, you need to have three correct, which prevents you from brute forcing all of the entries. Each new document you find can possibly contain another thread for you to track down, so close reading is necessary. A webpage could lead you to a newspaper article, which then leads you to a book you can look up at your local library, and then that book could be the first place you finally find the name of someone’s child, allowing you to fill in that missing piece you’ve been hunting for. It’s truly exciting when you do a deep dive on a seemingly inconsequential item that ends up cracking open a whole world of possibilities for you.
These types of puzzle games can be really intimidating at first, but fortunately The Roottrees are Dead has some fantastic systems that help you keep things moving. Each piece of printed out evidence you receive will be given an Intuition Score that will tell you how useful it is at the moment. The higher the score, the more information there is to extract. Once you lock in answers that use that information, the score will be adjusted accordingly. This is incredibly helpful late in the game when you have a ton of documents at your disposal but aren’t exactly sure which ones are still hiding secrets.
If that doesn’t help, the game has an incredibly robust and nuanced hint system at your disposal. You can always click on the rubber duck when you want some help, and it will give you a series of tiered hints that will point you in the right direction. This starts out very general, sometimes just reminding you of a concept or person that you might not have fully explored. If you still need more, subsequent clicks will get more and more detail with their hints until they explicitly spell searches you should do. I was never afraid to use this system when I needed a nudge, especially when I was starting a new session and needed a quick beginning point to go from. There’s also an in-game notebook to jot things down, allowing you to add things directly from documents with a quick highlight and click.
Since you’re spending so much time digging into documents, this game lives and dies on its writing, which thankfully is strong throughout. Not only does it do a great job of painting an overall story that involves hidden family secrets and scandals, but each of the branches of the family tree have their own little drama. Because of the fact that you’re examining this all so closely, it gives you a mechanical reason to be bought in on the intricacies, which means the twists and turns have a strong dramatic effect as they are revealed. Occasionally, the writing will get a bit too cute and self-aware, which can break the immersion of your 90s-style detective work, but for the most part it doesn’t get in the way of the clever plotting.
I’m really glad they replaced the AI-generated art from the game jam, but sometimes the cartoony presentation of the portraits doesn’t always work for me. This might just come down to the in-your-face nature of the title setting my expectations for a slightly more serious presentation, so your mileage may vary. The more lighthearted tone grew on me eventually, and importantly the art was always clear enough that you never got people confused with each other.
The main scenario in The Roottrees are Dead is already robust and satisfying, so for the game to come with basically an entire sequel is a treat. Roottreemania is a lot more scandalous, asking you to look into a series of people that are claiming to be related to the Roottree family following a series of alleged affairs. It’s a clever way to give you more branches to look into, and really leans into the more scandalous nature of the writing of the first. This scenario is just as strong as the first, even if I found the end game a little harder to decipher. Overall, the two sections will take about 10-12 hours to complete, which seems like a perfect length for this type of experience.
For those who are obsessed with true crime, this game gives you the opportunity to break out your string and corkboard, allowing you to live out your fantasy of being an armchair detective. The Roottrees are Dead makes finding the right piece of evidence and puzzling out someone’s identity thrilling and addictive. I often found myself saying I would just hunt down “one more lead,” only to keep playing for another hour and a half.
The Roottrees are Dead is available now on PC via Steam.
Review code provided by publisher.
