The Roottrees are Dead

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.