Ratings and Reviews by Kastel

When I play murder mystery games, I'm not necessarily looking for a "good story" (it's a nice bonus though) but rather the mechanics that make me feel like I'm roleplaying as a detective. I want to feel like I'm in a noir movie without the actual danger of being a private investigator.

The Roottrees are Dead sorta does that but with a genealogical twist. After Carl Roottree and his daughters died in a plane crash, a client approaches the player character for help in determining the Roottree family tree. You don't have much to work with, but you have access to this burgeoning medium called the Internet. It's up to your searching and deduction skills to figure out who's in the family and who isn't. That and a very helpful hint section which guides you throughout the game.

To lock in a guess, the player must correctly enter the names, portraits, and job descriptions of at least three "blood relatives". This number increases in later stages of the game. It's also good practice to uncover the identities of "optional" family members—that is, anyone married to someone with Roottree blood—so you have fewer choices. This encourages players to be thorough and follow the plot closely, which I appreciated.

While the game allows for easy comparisons to acclaimed mystery titles like Obra Dinn and especially A Hand with Many Fingers for its novel approach to clue-hunting, the title which reminds me most is Hypnospace Outlaw. Both games are set near the end of the millennium, and they are interested in how internet communities are beginning to develop and propagate information. While Hypnospace is clearly a lighthearted title about silly subcultures and you're chasing leads to mentally map out the history of a fictional Geocities, Roottrees makes you read summaries of what the player has found on fansites, conspiracy websites, and periodicals that are interested in specific subject matter. For example, you might read up old music album interviews to place someone else's job. The pacing of Roottrees may resemble the slow but methodical and satisfying process of playing an archivist in A Hand, but interfacing with the internet and not expecting what you'll find changes the feel of the investigation dynamic significantly.

Cybersecurity experts call what the player is engaging in "open-source intelligence". I found it amusing to learn that a family member was revealing so many details about other family members. Thanks to the internet, it's grimly funny that your cousin might host pictures of you on their personal website without your consent, allowing someone to figure out what you're like. The game uses the internet so effectively that it sometimes feels like a satire about how much information we're putting up.

Since a few family members are musicians, the game also lets you listen to their music. This makes their place in history feel more real. Overall, the soundtrack is quite great, with lots of jazzy music, folksy vocals, and disco appropriate for the setting.

The best part of the game is tracking down old periodicals and books in databases to learn about earlier generations of the Roottree family. I enjoyed learning about the different political factions and how they're tied to this patriarchal family structure they dislike. Everyone wants to live their own lives, but they have to accept that the Roottree Corporation has investments in many different industries, and someone has to sacrifice their time and money to run the business. It's #RichPeopleProblems, but I found it more organic and believable than most mysteries because you read primary and secondary sources to understand each branch's perspective on the situation. I found myself invested in some family members not only because they're informative, but also because you get a sense of how neglected or controlled they feel by the larger family.

However, the very thing that made the older generations fun to investigate is also a detriment to the newer generations. It's cute that the game follows the family from the interwar period through the baby boomer generation and hippie generations to more current times; this means we also see the fracturing of the larger family structure into smaller nuclear families with distant ties to each other. Much like in real life, these newer family members are distant cousins who don't have a reason to connect with each other. The few times it does happen in the game, it feels contrived, as if to remind the player that they're not simply pursuing one of the many separate rabbit holes out there, but rather investigating a cavernous network of relationships. But I found this part of the game just unconvincing from a narrative standpoint. Since the game acknowledges that families are breaking off and are not interested in taking control of the corporation unless forced to do so, everything that follows feels like a chore that must be done but not necessarily enjoyed. The newer members have little to do with the political drama. I understand that's more realistic, but I still found it unsatisfying.

The game's art direction is also frustrating to deal with. The original free game uses generative AI illustrations, and the commercial version does use human-made art but seem to be very based from the existing AI illustrations. While I've heard that the free game is harder to play since it requires you to spot characters with slightly different outfits and hair, I found the commercial version unsightly and irritating to play too. I think it's because there are so many puzzles that require you to identify individuals in large group photos. There's only so much you can do to make each family member stand out during their respective time period. This might be one of the ugliest mystery games I've ever played.

After beating the game, the commercial version adds a new, harder section called "roottreemania". I won't go into detail, but I found it to be a more focused and streamlined experience. It seems the staff recognized that the original game had too many meandering subplots that ended abruptly, so this new game stays true to its premise and offers a few fun surprises.

I had fun beating roottreemania, but once again, I felt unfulfilled. While I admire the novelty of its mechanics, I don't feel like I solved many interesting mysteries. Most of the work involved placing different family members on a large family tree. There wasn't much foul play; no one was murdered, and the stakes were monetary. I learned what I already knew about large, wealthy families: some people are pricks, some want the inheritance money, and many don't care and want to live their own lives. While some family secrets deserve to be made public, the conspiracy I was unraveling wasn't that interesting. I played the game not for the mystery, but because I found genealogical detective work fun.

And I suppose the final solutions to both the original game and roottreemania didn't win me over either. The title tries to bring up the sociopolitical implications of your discovery, and I appreciate the intent, but I just didn't really care. The themes revealed in the solution weren't reinforced enough for me to find them substantive.

This is why I said that The Roottrees are Dead sorta makes me feel I'm playing detective but not really. I was attracted to the game not because I wanted to solve the "big mystery" of who's in the family tree but the secrets and intrigue within the family. The tree, I thought, was going to be a way to organize the clues I've found about the family to solve a bigger and overarching mystery. Unfortunately, my misguided expectations had made me imagine a more interesting, subversive mystery scenario, which didn't really happen. In fact, the game was more historical fiction than mystery.

Make no mistake: it's a fun game that deserves your time and money. I can see it influencing other mystery games because it's doing something very different. Any mystery game that doesn't simply retread police procedural plots and mechanics is a welcome change.

But Roottrees never made me feel like I was uncovering a bigger plot. For me, learning who's who doesn't feel like a good substitute for murders or conspiracies in mysteries. I need something with stakes that makes me feel like I'm getting to the crux of something important.

Otherwise, I feel like my efforts don't amount to anything worthwhile. I felt like I was just giving more paperwork to the lawyers figuring out the Roottree inheritance problem. I didn't care about who's related, and the game even lampshaded that concern but ultimately did nothing to assuage it. Everything about this game made me feel I'm just helping some rich family for the sake of it.

Just before I played this game, my mom told me that I should get married next year, so that she and my dad would be happy to see all their children living happily and starting new families of their own. For her, I imagine it would be the end of her life's work of raising us. For me, it's another symptom of how much dread and affection I have for my family.

Remembrance plays on similar feelings: the player character's mother has passed away, and they can bring one of three objects of intrinsic sentimental value related to their mother on the spaceship back to earth to bury her body. The player reads the story behind each object and why it is a viable candidate to express the player character's ambivalence and distance from their mother. And then they have to make a choice: which object should they take and bury with their mother?

As a short story, this was a nice read. The writing is appropriately somber, and the science fiction worldbuilding provides an interesting backdrop for this story of grief. It captures what it feels like not to know how to feel about the people who have cared for you. As a short, single-choice Twine game, it was an effective and interesting one: the player has to choose for the player character how to grieve, and it's such a heavy responsibility that I remember pausing and thinking about my choices.

I see my single choice in this game not as the player character per se, but as a slight motivational nudge. Much of the game is about clicking the next hyperlink to get to the next page: only at the very end does the player have a choice to affect the story. While I was reading the thoughts of the player character, I was also quite detached from their perspective; it felt like I was reading someone else's diary, and I wasn't really internalizing their thoughts to roleplay as the character. I guess the lack of diegetic agency, aka the fact that I was doing nothing but reading and clicking to the next page, made me feel like I wasn't part of the story. It was their story, not mine.

So when I had to choose for the player character, it felt jarring. I had to choose for a fully realized character on how they should feel, grieve, and move on. The jargon term — ludonarrative dissonance — comes to mind, but that has always been used as a pejorative to indicate a failing of the game. But in this case, I think it adds weight to the choice because I'm some nobody whispering to the player character to choose, I don't know, the woodworking tools. I have to think about the other two objects the player character could have chosen, and what it means to leave them behind. It is strange to come to this conclusion, that the fully sketched out character and the detailed backstory of the objects made it hard for me to attach myself to the player character.

And I think that's why Remembrance is effective for me. To some extent, I feel similarly about my own parents and sometimes imagine how I would react if one (or both) of my parents were no longer in my life. But that's where the parallels stop: at the end of the day, I'm not that character in the space station wondering what to pick. The closeness of the narration already makes me feel like I'm invading their privacy. Paradoxically, the distance between me and the character makes my choice feel significant because it feels like I'm giving them a guide to life and beyond.

I don't have an answer for how to mourn the inevitable passing of my own parents. And yet, I have to give this character a satisfying answer. This dissonance makes me think about how I should prepare for this one day. I know that in the near future, I will be following a similar path to the player character in Remembrance; I just won't have the helpful voice of the player. Hopefully, I'll know which object to choose when the time comes.

The tale of Bluebeard is a violent story about a woman who learns that her husband was a rather gleeful murderer of his previous wives. The story has invited many different interpretations, ranging from a moralizing about the evil curiosity of women to a feminist stance against trusting one's husband in a patriarchal society.

Cochran seems to have recognized the versatility of this fairy tale by offering us three acts, three colors, and three Bluebeards.

The first act, He Knows That You Know and Now There's No Stopping Him, begins with the wife hiding a knife as her husband confronts her for opening the door. The player is given some dialog options, either to ask for forgiveness or to tell him that he will never be forgiven. The look of the game feels like I'm interacting with a play script, especially with the early modern English dialog. The Bluebeard character responds appropriately to my choices and makes me feel like my input matters. And yet, the outcome will always be the same -- it is that the choices the player makes will slightly contextualize the inevitable act.

The second act, Suspended In the Air so that All of Your Weight Is Concentrated on a Single Point Halfway Down Your Spine, puts the player in the role of the Bluebeard character who is, well, suspended in the air. There's not much context to be gleaned from the story: the player character wakes up in a daze, hears his wife and mother-in-law running around, and bleeds to death. There are several actions the player can take to escape, and the illusion of player agency is best expressed in this game. Several choices branch off into different narrative threads: in my second playthrough, I swung my player character too hard to open the door, and his wounds tore apart. He gets new options: crawl, scream, and bleed. Not the most useful set of actions, but it felt like my actions led to that bloody conclusion. It didn't matter that I knew that the ending was predetermined; it was so convincing that I didn't feel cheated at all.

Perhaps the most surprising fact is the mention of a [spoiler]laptop[/spoiler] at the end. The first act had primed me to see everything as historical, so I was quite unnerved by the dissonance.

The third (and as of this writing, the latest) act, It can't be true it mustn't be true, seems to reflect the player's state of mind as they near the end of the cycle. Set in the present, the player character receives a warning message about the man who invited them into his apartment. He's another Blackbeard character, of course, but the player character admits he's kind of hot. The game then transitions into a small escape room format: the player can examine objects and solve mini-puzzles to find new items that can help them escape.

But we all know how it must end. Echoing the first game, the player character can do a lot of meaningful things, but the ending will always be the same. No matter what Bluebeard iteration we're in, someone has to die.

The three games differ in structure, gameplay, characters, atmosphere, and time period. But they all play on the same horror: the patriarchal horror of the man you sleep with. There's no place to run because this is the person you've chosen to spend your life with. He is your life as far as the games are concerned. You either fight or become a victim.

How should we then understand the RGB Cycle as a whole? Is it a fatalistic interpretation of how abuse will always occur? A call to arms to be skeptical of charismatic men who might take advantage of you? A sobering reminder that the Bluebeard fairy tale is timeless because we see so much domestic violence in families and households?

It's hard to say: the cycle offers no palatable interpretation that rationalizes or softens the chaotic horror of the Bluebeard tale into something understandable. Arguably, the RGB Cycle resists such easy, authoritative readings because it is ultimately faithful to the spirit of the fairy tale. Unlike the more moralistic versions like Charles Perrault's, it revels in the sheer violence and paranoia of Bluebeard as a character. At most, the RGB Cycle acknowledges that yes, there is a cycle, and the actions we take will never free us from it -- but it is strangely silent about its message.

I find this silence quite admirable because it means that I have to meditate on the violence and find out what it means for me. Horror is most interesting to me when the "monster" is explicit, but its themes are contradictory and ambivalent; we know who the monster is from John Carpenter's The Thing, but the ending and its implication on the story remain a lively source of debate. Enigmas are more interesting to think about than something that has a clear solution.

I'm willing to admit that I don't understand the RGB Cycle, and that's why I really like it. I often thought I had an idea or two, but it was immediately negated by the next passage or something before that. Replaying the game helps very little except to reveal the lack of agency -- and even that is hard to parse thematically. What does it mean to have false choices in a Bluebeard story? Who knows, and that's why I find it exciting to think about it.

The RGB Cycle understands the timeless appeal of the Bluebeard fairy tales. The confrontation between husband and wife over a dark secret may feel simple as a plot device, but it leads to profound interactions that reflect gender norms, the cycle of abuse, and much more. Many people, then and now, revisit the fairy tale because there's something truly scary and compelling about not knowing everything about the person you've chosen to love. The RGB Cycle simply repeats this horror over and over again, never satisfied with one interpretation. It seeks diversity, repetition, and reiterations. There may be no ultimate meaning in this loop of writing and rewriting Bluebeard, but the horror remains resonant: the tale is still unsettling in 2024 and the years to come.

The myth of Andromeda prefigures all tales of knights, dragons, and damsels in distress. Here, we see a retelling that looks at the structure of such stories from the perspective of Andromeda herself.

This time, the player is Andromeda. The iron manacles "are for you". The choices given to the player dictate the meaning of what it means to be chained to the rocks and rescued by Perseus.

There are branching paths that do make her opinions of the situation more nuanced, but the results are always the same. There's no escaping the role she's been forced into: she'll always be the princess to be rescued and thus a footnote in ancient Greek mythology, whether she falls in love with Perseus at first sight and sees him disappear off to another adventure, or whether she resents her father and Perseus for not being the heroes they claim to be.

This is one of the more successful Andromeda retellings I've come across, perhaps because it's a work of dynamic fiction. We have all these choices, and yet nothing can be done. She has to be chained, re-chained for the myth to persist and activate our imagination. No matter how the game is replayed, the player will always be Andromeda, suffering and sick forever. I doubt the game has a secret ending where Andromeda gets to run away; that would turn the game into a much rosier picture of liberation from patriarchy. A far nicer picture, perhaps, but it wouldn't be the Andromeda myth at all.

I respect Andromeda Chained for sticking to its guns. It depicts her thoughts, the world around her, the absurdity of the situation, and the miserable state she's in without a whiff of sentimentality. In this way, the game is quite sobering: it reveals that the fantasy of knights and dragons can only be realized by limiting the princess's agency. This is not an uncommon lesson, but it's done so well that it's worth relearning once more.

Thread Unlocked is a very clever game about the dynamics of group chats on services like Discord. It simulates the experience by turning off slow mode and letting the player choose from a set of words that continue to another set of words before the game unceremoniously completes the line of dialog for the player.

It creates a feeling of deja vu, showing how group conversations often follow recognizable patterns. There must be a reason why slow mode was turned on, and these problems will be familiar to anyone who uses these services frequently.

This is doubly true because the player, through their choice of words, creates the backstory that leads to this confrontation between the speaker and their interlocutor. The feeling I had when the game completed my dialog for the first time was shock, and then the realization that, yes, this was something I could have said in a heated argument with a friend.

The uncanny experience of playing this game makes me reflect on past conversations. No matter what the context, I always felt like I was following a kind of formula: cliches and platitudes seem to be the only rhetorical weapon of choice in the heat of the moment. I wonder if their generality can downplay the source of these tensions -- one line of dialogue in this game seems to suggest that someone may have said something offensive, and the speaker is willing to move past it in order to de-escalate the conflict. It never struck me as absurd when I used it, but watching the game auto-complete it for me was so jarring that I realized how contrived this tactical move is.

The game reminds me of sweetfish's vanitas, another short game about the internet that shows how communities of all ages repeat the same patterns of flourishing and dispersal. The history of communication is a constant state of interruption and continuation.

But Thread Unlocked goes in a different direction: it taps into the subconscious patterns I've developed in communicating with people on the web. The responses I have accumulated from getting into fights, negotiating with others, and so on are on full display here. And I wonder if these were actually useful lessons or detriments to understanding between semi-anonymous people on chat clients.

I don't know, and the game doesn't provide an answer (even if it really cared). At the very least, I will continue to struggle to find a satisfactory solution thanks to this game. It's a thought-provoking simulation that deserves more recognition.