Ever since I completed Return of the Obra Dinn, I’ve been wanting to play something similar. Something that captured the fun of digging for clues and investigating. Something that captured that same feeling of when you uncovered the true identities of a few people. It was an exceptional game, and I loved playing with my partner.
Then I got wind of The Roottrees Are Dead. A genealogical mystery investigation of a powerful family with potentially dark secrets. A massive family tree just waiting to be completed by scouring the early internet for clues. Look up old news articles, read diaries, explore the history of a family, and go down rabbit holes that might lead nowhere. It’s so very clearly inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn – confirmed by the developer themselves via a lovely easter egg in the game we stumbled upon, and it’s excellent fun.
The Roottrees Are Dead Review
It’s the late 90s, dial-up internet, and it’s oh so familiar to the elder millennials, tones, clicks, buzzes, and flickers, bring to life your ‘Spidersearch’ following a visit from a mysterious individual asking you to look into the Roottree family history. Your job is to investigate the family and map the family tree. Stumble upon conspiracies, potentially suspicious deaths, affairs, and more as you dig through the archives of the internet, library, and news articles from magazines and more.
The setup is simple: you’re in your apartment, you have a corkboard full of blank pictures and names of the Roottree family tree. You have a dossier of evidence that will help guide you and provide clues for you to then search the internet for. You’ll start with a little bit of basic information to get you started. From there, you can head to your computer, fire up the internet, and start searching for keywords, people, organisations, and more to open up more clues, or to help you home in on the identities of family members.
There are some who will be easy to pin down, whilst other family members will be a lot more obscure and require meticulous reading of articles to confirm who they are.
There’s a real satisfying sense of gratification as you slowly piece together who is who. Coupled with the tactile sounds and feel as you search for clues on your retro PC. Then, when you finally have a few people correctly identified, the game confirms your suspicions or hunches, and it feels really good.
Be Prepared To Read
If you’re not into reading, then this won’t be the game for you. There is a lot to read through. Not only that, if you really want to confirm who everyone is, including spouses, then you’re going to have to concentrate when you’re reading. You can’t get by skimming over diary entries or articles. That being said, if you do get stuck or want a little nudge in the right direction, there is a tool that will help you. It will mostly just point you in the direction of a specific article or webpage.
Furthermore, you can keep track of important information in the game in a notepad, which will link text so that you can quickly refer back to something should you wish to have a recap or go over information once more. Although when we played through it, we didn’t make much use of it. Opting for a good ol’ fashioned pen and paper to keep our notes.
People’s time to finish the game will likely vary quite a lot, but we managed to get a good 10 hours out of it. Which I think is a really good amount of time. It didn’t drag or feel like we were dragging our feet throughout. Sure, there were a few names that took us longer to figure out than others. But that comes down to the reading, making sure you read everything carefully so you don’t miss out. As there will be times when you’ve definitely read through a piece of text and you’ll think to yourself, “I’ve already seen this” only to dive back in and notice another clue.
The Roottrees Are Dead was a really fun and interesting detective game. In fact I’d rank it up there as one of my favourites. Sure, it’s nothing flashy to look at, but scouring the internet and the archives was really fun. And it always links back to how satisfying it feels to discover people’s identities, matching up photos to names. That feeling is always excellent! If you loved Return of the Obra Dinn, then I think you’ll love this too.
-Will
