The Roottree’s private jet crashed days ago, leaving the entire family dead, the Roottree candy company with no leadership, and a lot of questions to answer about the future of the company. But you don’t care about the how or why, you’re here for the who.
If you enjoyed Return of the Obra Dinn, this game will be right up your alley. You play as the Geniology Genie, an anonymous investigator who is trying to crack the case of who in this world belongs to the Roottree family, and pin everyone to the family tree on your cork board by finding a photo of them, and matching it to their name and occupation. Like in Obra Dinn, you start with a list of relevant names, as well as a little bit of information given to you by your benefactor, however this time, you don’t start with painter’s sketches, so you’ll have to find the pictures yourself.
And how do you do that?
The internet, or at least a 1990s approximation of it.
This is where the gameplay diverges from Obra Dinn. While in that game all the information is readily given to you in a drip feed pattern to allow you to figure stuff out, here you’re given a list of notable people who can serve as your leads to start with, as well as a dripfeed of information as you progress, given to you by your benefactor, most of what you find will be from identifying search terms, looking them up, and scanning the results you find for more information and search terms. Some terms will also let you find copies of books to skim through, and new magazine archives to look through, so you can’t just find everything through the search engine, you have to put a little bit of critical thinking and some guesswork in too in order to find the information you need.
As you’re searching, you can highlight sections of evidence, books, websites, and periodicals and from there either search them directly, or copy them into your notebook. When you copy a quote like this, you can immediately jump back to it by clicking on it. This is a huge improvement over the demo where the notetaking was purely a text input. You can have as many pages in your notebook as you need, and each page can scroll indefinitely, so feel free to take as many notes as you want. The history button in your browser is also a godsend, as it will show you a list of every page title you’ve ever found during your playthrough, meaning you don’t have to remember what search terms you used to find something.
Once you correctly identify three direct descendents, the game will mark them as complete, lock them in, and also lock in any correct optional entries you’ve found. You don’t need the optional entries to beat the game, but getting them locked in removes them from the candidate pool. After all, the list of names you were given also includes spouses. The game also includes two hint systems. The first is less overt and enabled by default, called “Intuition”, and it is an incredibly simple tool that just tells you which pieces of hard-copy evidence will point you to the most information. This updates as you lock in more Roottrees to reflect documents being fully explored, but do note that towards the end of the game, the system breaks down slightly and some necessary information might not be marked by intuition (whether that is a bug or not, I don’t know.) If you’re really stuck, thats where the rubber duck comes in. You can talk through your problems with the duck, and it’ll help guide you into where you can look next. This unstucked us a couple times towards the very very end game.
After completing the tree, you’ll be able to play the game’s second story, Roottree Mania. While it would spoil the game’s twist to tell you anything about this mode, what I will say is it takes place about 8 months after the main game; a lot of searches have updated results and will tell you immediately if the results are new or old, as well as let you view the old result for new pages if needed; and the search is a lot more difficult and in-depth as the targets of your investigation are less in the public spotlight. Oh and you get no crew manifest this time around, you have to input names in the tree via choosing from a large list of first and last names.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2754380 £16.75
An old jam version/demo of sorts is available on itch. This game is vastly less polished and uses a lot of AI generated artwork for its imagery, making some identification type puzzles slightly harder to complete. The game is harder to navigate, the notebook is less helpful and there is no rubber duck hint system, but the entire main story is available to play if you’re able to put up with it. I recommend specifically the Steam version though.
Itch.io: https://jjohnstongames.itch.io/the-roottrees-are-dead (Jam Demo)
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