Genealogy is a fascinating subject, unless you belong to my family. My late grandmother traced our bloodline back to 1746 and discovered it was monogamous labourers all the way down. No ties to ancient kings. No murderers. Not even a societally frowned-upon divorce. Had developer Robin Ward made a game about knotting the DNA strands of my desperately unremarkable clan, it would be one of the dullest games ever committed to code.
Fortunately, The Roottrees are Dead has far leafier familial foliage to rustle than my gaggle of myopic Northern English peasants, challenging players with assembling the colourful history of an American business dynasty. It achieves this by combining the investigative Googling of Her Story with the deductive reasoning of Return of the Obra Dinn, producing a thoroughly entertaining—if not quite revelatory—slice of brainteasing interactive fiction.
Set in 1998, The Roottrees are Dead starts on an atypically bleak note. A plane crash has killed the Roottree sisters; a trio of world-famous models and teen icons, as well as their mother and father, the latter of which was President of the illustrious Roottree Corporation. As this news blares out of your character's grainy CRT television, a mysterious figure knocks on your door. Having heard of your talent for genealogy and fascination with historical mysteries, this shadowy individual hires you to map out the Roottree family throughout the 20th century.
Specifically, your goal is to identify fifty members of the Roottree clan, from the original founders of the Roottree Corporation to its most nebulous fifth-generation cousins. For each individual, you must correctly deduce their name, their most recent occupation, and their appearance by identifying them in a photograph. And to stop you from brute-forcing the answers in the various drop-down lists, your solutions will only lock-in when you make three correct identifications at once.
You approach this puzzle in proud Internet goblin tradition—conducting all research and investigations from the comfort of your small studio apartment. Your tools are the corkboard where the unfilled family tree is laid out in a web of red string, the table where important documents can be inspected, and most importantly of all, your beautiful beige PC and its blisteringly-fast 56k modem.
The investigation starts out simply enough. Typing the names of the Roottree sisters into the authentically pre-Google search engine SpiderSearch yields quick results. Yet despite the global renown of the Roottree Corporation, only a few family members are easily caught by SpiderSearch's primordial algorithms. For the rest, you'll have to look for clues elsewhere, searching the online archives of local newspapers and old magazines, looking for references to family members in diary entries, inspecting family photographs, even analysing the packaging of items produced by the Roottree corporation or the creative works of specific family members.
As a puzzle, the Roottree family tree is enormously gratifying to engage with, a warren of twisting, interconnecting rabbit holes where you'll dig as far as you can reasonably go in one, uncover several others in the process, then plunge into one of those other passages when the current one finally hits bedrock. It is slightly more directed than either, Her Story or Obra Dinn—only providing you with certain clues at set progression points. But it nonetheless sparks moments of true deductive inspiration, and it's possible to identify many of the Roottrees before the game provides you with the bigger pieces of evidence.
But The Roottrees Are Dead is as much a narrative experience as it is a puzzle, the story playing out like a hooky VHS of a serial family drama that has been taped over multiple times. Assembling the family tree reveals tales of turbulent marriages, secret love affairs, bitter lawsuits, and Succession-style family business shenanigans. To be clear, though, it isn't an especially dark or mean-spirited game. Tonally it's fairly lighthearted, blending simple yet colourful 3D visuals with a jazzy, lounge-music soundtrack, giving it the vibe of a classic nineties adventure game—even if it is mechanically very different.
By far the wisest choice the story makes is to avoid the path of conspiracy thriller. While the game starts with an array of tragic deaths, the central mystery has little to do with this inciting event, better befitting a game about genealogy and identifying family ties. Indeed, it actively pokes fun at the Reddit-thread approach to Internet sleuthing, and how it can lead people to dark and deranged places. The game could engage with this debate more than it does, but the mystery is one you could feasibly solve from your gaming chair without crossing ethical boundaries.
There are a couple of more tangible issues. Although I enjoyed the act of sleuthing throughout, I don't think the mystery is ultimately as interesting as those offered by Obra Dinn or Her Story. I also think the latter half of the game hinges too heavily on a couple of pieces of evidence, disrupting the flow of searching for and then analysing clues. And while visually it does enough to be recognisably nineties in its setting, it isn't the most stylistically appealing game I've ever played. That said, the Steam release does replace the AI-generated images present in the itch version with hand-drawn art, which is a welcome change.
This isn't the only change the Steam release makes either. It also adds a second, entirely new mystery called "Roottreemania" that follows directly from the conclusion of the original story. It's hard to describe what this is about without spoiling that initial tale, but it involves delving into the seedier parts of the Roottree family history, and the unexpected results of these shadier activities.
The Roottrees Are Dead may not be quite as novel or artful as the games that partly inspired it, but it is nonetheless an elegantly designed sleuthing sim capable of absorbing your attention for hours on end. Its less intense atmosphere also makes it ideal for cosying up with over a few cold January evenings, channelling the feel of an older style of adventure game while being irrefutably modern in its execution.
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