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.

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.

If you liked the deduction aspects of Return of the Obra Dinn but felt it was either too gruesome or too hard on the eyes, then The Roottrees are Dead should be your perfect game.

It’s 1998 and The Roottree Candy Company has been around for about 70 years. Sadly, their CEO Carl Roottree, his wife, and their three daughters have all perished in a plane crash. You’ve been approached by a shadowy figure to help sort out the will. You see there’s chaos within the company as they try to replace the CEO while also figuring out who in the family truly has Roottree lineage and deserves a piece of the family’s fortune. Your job is to use the primitive world wide web to scour for sites, news articles, and periodicals to piece together the massive family tree and determine who truly is a direct discendant of Elias Roottree, the company’s founder. While the premise is quite far-fetched, it doesn’t make the puzzle any less fun.

The entire game takes place in one room as you never need to leave the comfort of your home for your research. On one wall is a cork board with a general outline of the family tree. There’s a spot for each person with room for a picture, their full birth name, and their most recent occupation. Every time you correctly identify all of these questions for three people, a wonderful chime plays and they are “locked in” to the board.


The first few identifications are fairly simple as identifying Carl and his family is as simple as browsing the web for recent news articles. However, there are 50 names to complete on the tree, and they get progressively harder, especially with lesser known cousins who aren’t regularly in the news cycle. Your shadowy figure eventually reveals themselves to be a descendant and occasionally gives you some helpful evidence she has found, but for the most part you are cross-referencing obscure facts from the internet with the library’s on-line book and periodical databases. Even poorly made fan sites loaded with frames are not beyond your search for the truth.

Visually, you are not looking at real websites. While you manually type in to a primitive search engine, results are summarized on the screen for you. However, if you find good evidence, such as photos or articles, they will be downloaded and printed in color so you can examine them more closely. Accessing evidence is a simple click away, and filling out the cork board is equally simple, using one click to select from a list of pictures, first and last names, and occupations.

Deduction is frequently necessary. For example, you may know the current last name of a member of the tree, but you’re required to get their birth name. And so you may first need to figure out who their father was first before filling it in. Or you may find an article that says your person was a housewife, but then realize that wasn’t their “final” job and must make inferences from other sources to identify what they did for work after their divorce, say. I was worried this kind of search might get stale, but there’s so many creative puzzles that the deduction never feels repetitive.


There’s gentle instrumentals playing the in the background, which you can shut off if you like. However, a few members of the family are or were singers, and you can listen to original tracks made just for the game. While they for the most part don’t contain evidence themselves, I found them a hoot to listen to.

At the moment I correctly identified the final family member (which requires deducing which evidence you’ve found is false), I felt a rush of satisfaction at completing the game. Only to my surprise, I was only halfway done. The family comes to you again and says a bunch of people are claiming they are Roottrees due to infedelities in the family’s past, and you must determine who is truly a Roottree descendant and who is not. Play continues much the same, which a slightly ramped up difficulty.

I never once required a hint while playing despite not finding any part of the game easy. With how much fun I was having I was persistent in my search and never found myself frustrated and never scoffed at an answer for being too obtuse. It truly is a magnificently designed mystery.


After all that is done, you can access yet another basic mini-game, with ten separate family trees to complete just going off of some basic rules for each game. Each one only takes a few minutes, but it was still a nice diversion.

I only have a few minor quibbles with the game. The first is the graphics, which are so basic I genuinely thought they were made with AI. Ironically, the original web-based version of the game was indeed made with AI. So I do give them props for going with hand-drawn visuals, even if they didn’t turn out the greatest. The limited voice acting in the game is also pretty brutal.

The other reason I didn’t like this quite as much as Obra Dinn is that there’s just no reason to care about anything you’re doing outside of the puzzle. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I certainly enjoy puzzles for their own sake. But it’s hard to feel much about helping a bunch of filthy rich people. And they made little effort to truly make any of the characters much more than an avatar.

Despite the production values being a bit rough around the edges, The Roottrees are Dead is a must play for anyone who likes a good logic puzzle. It has proved to very popular so far and will hopefully lead to a similar masterpiece from the developers.