The Roottrees are Dead

(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 I would describe most of the writing as "text" rather than "prose," and it bothered me how many of the historical documents used very modern-feeling language, but I also understand that flowery or unclear verbiage would be much more frustrating to parse useful info from.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.