Ratings and Reviews by RainbowDarter

I want to say right off the bat that Kinophobia gets brownie points for having the map and list of commands as separate webpages, rather than having to navigate the parser to bring them up. This is a game where you have to keep a lot of mental plates spinning, and I found myself making lists of important search terms so I wouldn't forget to research them. Having to interrupt that to bring up an in-game map rather than just clicking a tab over would have driven me bonkers.

Besides its commendable formatting, Kinophobia has a lot of great things going for it. The standout for me is the writing: scenes are beautifully and clearly set, documents feel authentic to both time period and format, and the world is so fleshed out it was sometimes hard for me to tell what was fully fictional. There isn't much in the way of dialog (until the climax), but what was there I found uniquely clever and witty, a welcome respite from all the horror and asbestos.

While it may initially seem like a standard haunted house-type exploration game, the core puzzle element of Kinophobia is actually research. In fact, I only recall two environmental puzzles in the entire game, which does bring somewhat into question why we didn't just do all this Googling before we started wandering around Health Hazard Studios, but whatever. As I implied in my intro paragraph, the documents and articles you find aren't merely a straight line of inquiry, one prompt into another. They branch off, spider into each other, lead to dead ends and cul-de-sacs. I found myself frequently following a string of informational pearls I thought would have all the answers, only for it to loop back onto itself, or for the reveal to be something I already knew. This wasn't frustrating, it was engaging.

What was frustrating was the way the game organizes the items and information you've collected. Maybe it would be a betrayal of the spirit of the parser game, but I really think Kinophobia would benefit from a side menu where you could see your notes and inventory alongside the main text. I tried keeping track of everything in a separate document, but quickly found that keeping everything up to date was a puzzle unto itself, and a crappy one at that. Oh, and while I'm complaining, the psychic vision mechanic didn't gel with me at all. That may be because I forgot about it until the end of the game, and had to go through my entire inventory and touch everything one after another in hopes of a ghost popping up.

Still, I wouldn't be giving it five stars if I didn't think Kinophobia made up for those shortcomings. If you want the thrill of urban exploration, the satisfaction of uncovering forgotten facts, and the scares of a great ghost story, I can't recommend this one highly enough.

(This review is for the free, 2023 version)

When compared to swashbuckling space adventures, Lovecraftian horror epics, and sizzling 17th century romances, a "genealogy simulator" sounds like a slog through Snoozetown. Indeed, for someone who prefers fast-paced, think-on-your-feet puzzling, The Roottrees Are Dead would probably be an excellent sleep aid. If however, you're like me, and can lose hours of time in the depths of Wikipedia, or has fond memories of the days when hyperlinking someone on your blog was the highest honor one could gift another human, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.

I won't go too deep into the plot, both because of spoilers and because it's honestly a bit thin, but the core gameplay loop consists of looking up keywords in one of several databases and using deductive (inductive?) reasoning to place the information you find on a family tree. Names are placed via a dropdown list, so you do have a fallback "rub everything on everything else"-type solution if you get stuck, but the game is generally quite forgiving with search terms and the like. I had to look up some hints near the end, but that was the result of me missing a few obvious signposts.

My 5-star rating is genuine, I do think Roottrees deserves that, but it's not flawless. I would describe most of the writing as "text" rather than "prose," and it bothered me how many of the historical documents used very modern-feeling language, but I also understand that flowery or unclear verbiage would be much more frustrating to parse useful info from. As previously stated, the framing device isn't all that great; the premise is kind of flimsy, and every time I was thrown into dialog I found myself skimming, trying not to lose my investigative chain. There's a big emotional reveal at the end that I actually found quite effective and poignant, but I'm not confident everyone will feel that way.

In spite of my criticisms, I still find myself wishing I could somehow wipe my brain and replay this fresh all over again, and I think that's the mark of a truly great puzzle. If you've never played it before, you have the chance to do just that.

As an addendum, I want to talk about the art. There's certainly an argument (several, truthfully) to be made that AI art shouldn't exist at all. If there's anywhere that it ought to be used, though, I think this is the project for it: Roottrees has a lot of artwork, most of it human faces, and all those people have to be recognizable across multiple photos. Most importantly, AI art is only used in the non-commercial version, and the full game uses hand-crafted artwork. Call me a shill for Big Tech if you must, but I'd rather a game be released (for free) with generative artwork than simply not be released at all.