The Roottrees are Dead

so i will say up front that i'm not a fan of ai art, and if i had realized that this game had a lot of it i might not have started playing. but i knew absolutely nothing about it when the itch.io algorithm served it up to me, and by the time i started seeing the really wonky, obviously ai-ish images, i was too hooked to quit. which is a testament to the creator's game design abilities, if nothing else.

the concept of the game is that you're doing genealogical research to place all the roottrees (a very on-the-nose name, but i'll forgive it) on a big old family tree. complicating this is the fact that it's the 90s, so search engines are in their early days and no one has a convenient insta profile for you to get details of their life from. on the other hand, most of the roottrees are at least kinda famous, so there is more info about them on the internet than there would have been for the rest of us plebs in that era. it's all a matter of closely reading whatever documents you currently have and figuring out which keywords will lead you deeper down the research rabbithole. this all works very smoothly. even though any fiddly-ness (is that a word? 😅) about exact keywords could have been excused as a matter of period accuracy, i don't remember any situations in which the game didn't recognize something i thought it should have.

plot-wise this is mostly just a "rich white people causing each other problems" kind of story, and not even in an over-the-top hbo succession way. honestly if it had been a book i don't think it would have held my interest. but the effort you have to put into following the trail of breadcrumbs to figure out who fell out with who, when, and over what made it really compelling. during the 48 hours between starting and finishing the game (i did it in two sittings on consecutive days - i want to say it's maybe like 6 hours of gameplay?), i was thinking about it all the time. and i did end up being fond of some of the characters, even if most of them are not very fleshed out.

(my favorite minor character is the one - caroline, i think? - who left her lousy husband to be a lesbian sculptor. goodforher.jpg)

as much as i enjoyed it, though, i have to say i don't think it was well served by the ai art. obviously i am biased, but i think it presents practical problems for the game beyond my personal tastes. one, the more individuals there are in an image, the more distractingly weird the anatomy becomes, and that really took me out of the experience. two (and probably more importantly), the fact that ai image generators can't make multiple consistent images of the same character is a HUGE issue for a game where identifying people in photos is a core mechanic.

you might say this doesn't really matter THAT much because you only need to identify one image of each character - everything else is bonus points. but with the large group images, in most cases, you're clearly supposed to be doing a process of elimination. like, "okay, there are five guys in this picture, and four of them are people i have solo photos of elsewhere, so the fifth must be the one guy from this generation/branch of the family that i haven't seen yet!" except that's hard to do when the four other guys look completely different from how their other photos are. i ended up just doing straight up trial and error for a lot of those, just trying tagging everyone of the right age/gender in a photo as the missing person until the game told me i got it right. this was frustrating, especially in a game that's mostly careful about not making you guess at random. (it wasn't trying to make you guess at random, of course, the limitations of the technology just turned out that way.)

anyway, i hear the creator is remaking this with human-made art and i'm sure that's going to be great! if you're interested in the game i might suggest waiting until that version is out. but if you're impatient or can't spend the money, this version is worth a look too.