The Roottrees are Dead

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.