A lot of people are comparing this game to Obra Dinn, and that is by some extent a true statement. Your goal is to identify people on a list - and that's kind of where the similarities end. Roottrees is not physically searching for clues and context. It is 95% reading and 5% tearing your hair out. It is the curated Wikipedia deep dive of your dreams. It is the information hunt for a dissertation you will never write. It is following threads of articles for an hour to find out someone's maiden name. It is developing personal beef with the name Elias. And it is audibly cheering when you finally figure out the birth order of too many siblings. Roottrees will scratch that particular itch for these particular people. And once you're all done - there's an even harder familiy tree to sort out. An absolute treat that I still haven't fully cracked. Occupation: Baby.

Good but frustrating (if you’re stupid). It’s a genealogical deduction game where you scour over a sudo internet to retrieve relevant information about a mystery. This ever growing breadcrumb trail provides the information to fill in the detailed history of multiple generations of a family, all without leaving your house. Similar to Obra Dinn and Golden Idol, you are confirmed correct when a certain amount of deductions are all correct and it feels fantastic looking up a source, following a trail, doing some logical deduction, and seeing that your guess is correct. The hint system especially is great because it guides you to where you should look at first which sends you down rabbit holes that you spend hours trying to dig your way out of. If you’re into other deduction games, you’re gonna love that aspect. That being said, unless you’re a turbo nerd (non-derogatory) who is prepared to physically write notes for every minor detail and follow up, getting the most out of the mystery is going to be hard. There are no keywords like Golden Idol since everything is freeform text. This is great because it really does feel like sleuthing and detective work. However, it REALLY feels like grindy detective work when you have hundreds of individual pieces of evidence and you forget where you got a detail from just to backtrack through your entire logical tree to get back to some article. You’re going to need to write detailed notes of how you got where since the UI is early internet and doesn’t store much outside of page history and a highlighting notebook. You miss one little proper noun and entire swaths of evidence could be blocked off. The ending takes the kiddie gloves off and just says “go deduct”. You have to read in between clues, look at dates, and match every scrap of evidence to another to get the actual final answer. Luckily the game does still allow dumb people like me to wrap up the story without getting it 100% right. For some turbo nerds (again not derogatory), this is fantastic and will scratch that deduction itch after you speedrun Obra Dinn, thought it was too easy, and gave Her Story GOTY. For smooth brained puzzle lovers who need constant dopamine hits and don’t have the journaling skills of a tik tok mom, it can get frustrating not being able to figure it out. Skill issue I know.

This game was made specifically for me, a librarian with an interest in genealogy. It brought the same sense of accomplishment I get from putting together a physical puzzle -- each little piece fitting together until suddenly I have the whole picture. It made me want to create my own mystery game in the same way reading a good book makes me want to write my own. TL;DR: This game engaged my intellect, sparked my creativity, and watered my plants.

Really enjoyed everything about this game and was going to give it a glowing review until the credits rolled and revealed that it used Midjourney to generate some of the art for the initial version. While the developer states that this version doesn't use that technology for any of its art, if I'd known this game was built on stolen and environmentally destructive art, I wouldn't have bought it.

Housewife until proven otherwise.

Woke propaganda disguised as murder mystery. Misleading title.

I refunded this game at the start of the tutorial. It looked like it was about to be real tedious and boring. If I wanted to do literal genealogy research I don't need to buy a game for that.

I didn't make it very far as this game is just kinda creepy, in a bad way, at first. You are tasked with finding the family tree for 3 models that died in a plane crash. You spend several hours being a stalker and trying to find everyone that is related to the models via the internet, public library, and various magazines and publishings. I got the game expecting a detective game and instead just learned how to be a stalker, don't recommend unless you are trying to learn how to be a real creep

I live just outside of Pittsburgh and these mfs almost landed directly on my house

I actually enjoyed playing this game, but I can't recommend it due to its use of AI art despite the dev saying elsewhere that they did not use it. It's blatantly obvious in the pictures, and I wish the dev had been upfront with their use of it. I refuse to support products made with ai when human artists could have been hired. See my screenshot in the community hub for evidence (there's plenty more as well).

This a negative recommendation sorely due to the misinformation and incorrect comparisons in the reviews that baited me hard into buying this game. The game itself is probably fine. But this is NOTHING like golden idol games or even obra dinn there's barely any mystery. It's a family tree porn game, if you find the idea of figuring out what "He's my third cousin from my mother's side thrice removed" means fun, then by all means this game is for you.

It's a fun puzzle game. Challenging, but not impossible. I love the "old internet" mechanic. My only complaint is that I wish there was somewhere in-game to make and take notes.

Great puzzle game. If you are stupid, you should play this game to feel more stupid.

The Roottrees Are Dead is a nostalgic sleuthing simulator and an ADHD-hyperfocus stimulator. As a research junkie with fond memories of the late 90s, I thought it might be fun -- and then it consumed my brain. There are no unmarked spoilers in this review.

Story

In 1998, the fifth president of the Roottree Corporation and his heirs perish in a tragic plane crash. Due to a quirk of the family trust, you're tasked with identifying the first president's blood descendents using only dial-up internet, a list of names, and intuition. Set aside 6 - 8 hours to solve the original Roottree mystery. Your actions have consequences, and the Roottrees return in Roottreemania (included): now it's 1999, and they need your help navigating a complex web of buried secrets, dead ends, and red herrings. You have only the barest of clues to start with, more leads to chase, more mysteries to unravel, and another 12 - 16 hours of investigating ahead of you.

Gameplay

Gameplay requires a mouse and keyboard, and revolves around taking notes in an in-game notebook while muttering to yourself and rotating between three screens: the family tree where you identify Roottrees by their birth name, occupation, and photo; an evidence table where you clip images and peruse printed documents or other physical materials (because it's the 90s!); and a clunky old desktop where you "SpiderSearch" every remotely interesting term on "NetScrape Explorer," browse periodicals, or play minigames. I realize this sounds like homework, but the overall experience is more akin to diving down research rabbitholes while watching reality TV.

What Worked For Me

✅ Art. The Steam edition of Roottrees swaps out the browser game's AI art for portraits by Henning Ludvigsen, a board game artist you might know from Betrayal at House on the Hill (3rd Ed), Blood Rage, or the phenomenal Android: Netrunner. As a result, squinting at jawlines and eyebrows to identify characters is a perfectly valid strategy. ✅ Deduction. If you get stuck, you can ask your rubber duck for a hint or two -- but they’re only hints. Similarly, some information is directly stated in articles, but the game has no interest in holding your hand; you have to make logical deductions and occasional leaps of logic, and might not know until the credits roll if you were right. ✅ Depth + Humor. I would 100% watch a Netflix reality show or docudrama about the Roottrees; each and every one is delightfully weird in their own special way, the summarized search results are often funny, and it's incredible how much content there is to find. ✅ Locking In. When you correctly identify 3+ persons of interest, their profiles "lock in." It's often easy to pin down two folks at once, but getting three or more takes a while, and -- in the red herring-infested waters of Roottreemania especially -- the space between confirmations leaves you second guessing everything and diving deeper into the madness. ✅ Sound Design. The background music is noticeable but not distracting, and helped keep my ADHD brain in Research Mode. There's also five (5) original songs to discover across the two games, and some are catchy.

What Didn't Work For Me

❎ Replayability. After replaying 1/3 of the base game to score an achievement (to avoid the same fate, do not answer the phone), I can say this isn't very replayable. The family tree is always the same, and half the fun is chasing every possible lead as far as you can. ❎ Roottreemania ends with a single (but juicy) loose end and an offhand remark about a possible sequel, and yet the studio's newly announced next game is not Roottreemania 2.

Final Thoughts

You lament that this incredibly vital information wasn't available months ago, when it truly mattered.

At time of writing, I'm sitting on 100% achievements, a slew of funny screenshots that I can't share because spoilers, a real-life spiralbound notebook full of grids and timelines (the in-game one wasn't cutting it at a certain point), and a desperate need for more. I had so much fun with this even when it felt like I was finding nothing but dead ends, or when a certain minigame seriously tested my patience. It felt like diving into a wiki or going down a rabbithole on the original Cracked website (RIP), while still staying true to the pre-Y2K aesthetic and challenging you to really think things through.

Recommendation

I waited for a sale, but this is the rare game that I would've been happy to pay full price for. If you enjoy point-and-click management games like Papers Please and/or real-life cybersleuthing, I think you'll have a lot of fun with Roottrees. That said, most of the game involves reading and parsing chunks of text, and making inferences from available information. If pretending to be a digital Sherlock Holmes doesn't sound like a good time, then you can probably skip this one.

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Not all Roottrees are dead, probably

The Roottrees are Dead (He's right, they are dead) The Roottrees are dead (Look at that one, it's dead) It had to be done (I'll just confirm that they're dead) So that we could have fun (Affirmative - I poked one, it was dead) ------------------ Now that I've finished the games, I can speak about them earnestly. Yes, I said games. There's two in here, and while they are very similar to each other, they are not the same. Both games have you filling out a family tree by deducing its members and where they are placed using research and logic. The means of doing so involves mostly searching things on your 90s PC using 90s interfaces, whether it be the web, the library, or an archive of magazines. You gather the info and connect the dots. There's no jump scares or tricky arcade minigames; just you and your brain and a lot of typing and clicking. Let's get it out of the way - if you like fill-in-the-blank / sleuthing style games like Return of the Obra Dinn or Curse of the Golden Idol or to a certain extent, The Painscreek Killings, then you will find yourself right at home here and you will have a really good time. The original was apparently a web-based game that I never played so this was all new to me, but the premise of digging up a mountain of information from hints that range from obvious to obtusely-vague to fill out a monstrous-looking family tree wasn't quite thematically up my alley, but seemed intriguing all the same. As expected, as you dig further, you'll uncover the stories of these people and all of the drama that comes with a rich and varied family history that spans decades. It's all well put together and written concisely without wasting a lot of your time; that is to say, most of what you read is pretty useful in some way or another, but by varying degrees. The majority of search results don't mimic what you'd get in the real world; instead the game opts to provide you with summaries and excerpts which may or may not be useful, but definitely lightens the load of sifting through real-world search results. The trade-off is that you don't typically get to see any of the "accidental" stuff you would normally get with a regular ol' Googlin'. Oftentimes, you'll be led to physical pieces of evidence one way or another by way of a not-very-90s printer that not only prints immaculate photos and magazine covers, but also music. Listen, don't be a pedant. In any case, both games have you sifting through text, photos, articles, books, etc. to piece together the family tree. While the game doesn't ever really hold your hand in this regard (unless you want it to by way of a pretty good hint system), it does offer you a bit of a crutch by taking a break every once in a while to confirm what you've nailed correctly. It is a welcome thing (to me) that you don't necessarily find in its peers. At first this is pretty regularly done, but the conditions to trigger that reckoning start to get more sparse as you move along. Still, when it happens, the dopamine hit of being told you're right is pretty great. The first, original, remastered game of the same name by Jeremy Johnston is a bit easier to manage than its sequel (Roottreemania) by Robin Ward. While you have a lot of blank spots in the family tree, you have a definitive list of names to work with, which makes "brute forcing" some of the family members pretty easy. I'm not sure if that was built into the design or not, but I often felt that I was "doing it wrong" in the first game by making full use of the given list. The second game is much more difficult as the possible names you can enter are broken up into first names and surnames that you can mix and match, so it's a lot less susceptible to lucky guesses. Granted, the games are not designed to be completed with lucky guesses. Everything can be logically deduced... provided your searching skills are good enough to get you the info you need. Part of the challenge of the game is that it has a very robust, yet limited range of results that it can return and it doesn't leave a lot of room for error. That is not to imply that you need to be overly meticulous or that the game engine is overly stubborn, but more that specific information requires specific searches in the right place. You might be on the right track, but slightly off and the game won't go through any motions to correct your course. You'll understand if/when you play it, but it is something that you'll need to manage as a player. In terms of challenge level, however, the follow-up that Robin Ward developed is purposely more difficult not only due to the way it handles its list of names, but also due to the confidence required in many of its deductions. Where the first game can often feel obvious, especially once you get one certain key piece of evidence that provides the foundation, the second game has no such thing. The rabbit holes are everywhere and unless you organize yourself, you'll likely forget how you started at point A and somehow ended with conclusions for point C. I also got the feeling like the first game didn't really go out of its way to mislead you, but Ward's take on the concept is to throw red herrings all over the place which will definitely keep you on your back foot. That said, the challenge is loads of fun and I found myself stuck way more times in Roottreemania than I did in ...Dead. It was very good at making me feel dumb and making me question my abilities, but I did reach the end without help, though I apparently barrelled my way past a lot of info. A good reason that I was able to succeed without looking up hints/walkthroughs was the powerful notebook tool in the game engine. At first, I was manually taking notes in it, but once I realized how to properly use the highlight function, I was off to the races. My oldened mushy brain isn't great at retaining short-term anything so while manual notes were good, the highlight function allowed me to not only note down the important stuff, but also provided a link to its source. This functionality was invaluable as there are so many places to search that it's easy to get lost in it. More than once I had to ask myself, "Where the heck did I learn this from?" Being able to revisit the source with a single click really helped me to put info together and go over things that I had missed on my first viewing. I doubt I could have completed the game without this tool or a really thick notebook to work with (which would have driven me crazy, if I'm honest). It is worth mentioning that there is a final twist to the follow-up game that I wasn't expecting and it forced me to go over everything again. That is not to say any of your work is undone, but more that you'll need to review everything to make one final conclusion that you probably weren't thinking about the entire time. At least I wasn't. Then again, way smarter people than me have played these games and struggled far less than I did, so maybe it's more obvious than I know. To me it was like "Huh?? I gotta think about that now?" even though I did have some inkling of suspicion somewhere in the back of my mind. I had a lot of fun with this, especially the first game. I think the remastered original hit that right amount of challenge that made it a good time end-to-end. The second game was a much bigger mountain to climb and while still fun, I definitely had my moments of "Oh, Robin, please break your toe," (I didn't mean it). As you can see by my hour count, I work a little slow and I can say more hours were spent on -Mania than on ...Dead, but both games put together provided a full experience that I thoroughly enjoyed. It's not easy to write something like this and I think both authors/developers did a tremendous job of keeping me engaged which is no easy feat, let me tell you.

The Roottrees can go root themselves. So this is meant to be a Return of the Obra Din type game where you have to sort through a bunch of documents to figure out which family member is which so that you can figure out who are the rightful heir/heiress to a multibillion dollar candy bar empire. I sort of had my doubts about getting it, but it was on sale and I said why not. The problems I had were the following: 1) The documents you are going through are spread out throughout a terrible interface where they're basically all laid out on a table or in a Netscape Navigator search box. As you go through the game, you are expected to highlight things and put them in the in-game journal, which is all fine. But unfortunately, the journal does not let you do Ctrl+F. This means that if you catch a reference to Edgar Roottree III's dildo store and think 'oh I read about that earlier', then you have a choice of either going through the pages of highlighting that you did or just remember what page of the Buttstuff Weekly you read that in. You could sort the highlighting pages into different topics and subheadings, but it's clunky and annoying to do that. If the game had just had a Ctrl + F feature, that would have helped enormously. I just wanted a simple way to sort through all the information I had previously highlighted about a character. Without that, it felt like the game was less about solving mysteries and more about organising a binder. 2) Because keeping your stuff in order is so hard, very often the thing you're going to use to get through this stuff is the in-game hint system. It's good that this exists because it let me keep plugging along and helped me keep track of names, but because going through the data is such a slog, I found that it rapidly became the first resort. The hints would be telling me things I already knew, but would essentially be pointing me to pages that I couldn't find for the life of me. But again, I don't want to be a detective that uses the "I'm stumped" hints. I would rather have solved things on my own. See #1. 3) The plot twist is completely underwhelming. I was expecting something about conspiracies or aliens or something, but instead it ends up being a PSA. This left the game with a real "Oh... that's it?" feeling. There's a post-game game about finding out which of the Roottrees were sleeping with who, but I don't think I'm going to bother. Overall conclusion: A lot of puzzle games are trying to push this thing where you're supposed to write things down. Tunic and Blue Prince wanted you to do that, and I think this thing did too. I grew up in the 90s too and I know what feeling that's trying to invoke, but can we please maybe get over that sometime soon? If you want me to make a journal, please give me the tools to make said journal inside of your game. Just a word processor with some basic search functionality would be nice. Please don't expect me to go down to the stationary store so that I can solve your puzzles. Final Rating: 5.124643/11

This game is SO good. You know how when cats are figuring out a puzzle or are really excited and they start wagging their tails? It's like that. I've been playing with my sister and I highly recommend playing it with a partner. Not only do you get to bounce ideas off of each other but you can high five every time you lock things in. We just have the very end of Roottreemania to finish but I've really enjoyed it!

It is mainly a text based game where you must fill a family tree. It truly was an unique experience and really enjoyed it except for some flaws: - it uses english nicknames rather full name, as a non english native speaker, it really was hard to determine the actual name of the character, specially when the full name is required into the family tree. - as the evidence and visited web site grows, it really get a mess to find something, specially when you first thought it was irrelevant. That said, do not ask me to do your familly tree, I might end up telling your dog is your grand aunt.

I love this game. Playing it scratched the itch to be nosy and to organize things. Highly recommend.

Great game for people who like to browse through the citation list on Wikipedia

"Roottreemania" more like "Roottree men, ya should learn what a fucking condom is", jesus christ

The art looked kinda interesting and offputing, which I assumed was by design, but there's no way Dr. Steven Wilson's photograph was not AI generated.

I devoured this game in like two days, its that good. Less morbid but fills that Obra Dinn shaped hole in my heart. A fantastic treat for fans of mystery games, detective games, genealogy and rubber ducks! Praying for 20 sequels where we untangle a King Roottree's family tree, or a Lady Roottree's marital affairs. I'll even take sorting out the genealogy of the Roottree family pets! Anything for more Roottrees!

If they come out with a different game, "The Deadtrees Are Root", with a family of hackers and their shenanigans, I'll probably play it. Also, it pained me not to recommend since it's a lot like Hypnospace Outlaw in the gameplay. I love these research games and want to see more of them. I conditionally recommend this: if you are all about LG issues (no BTQ+ as far as I know in this game), you'll love it. If you wanted a mystery-research game unencumbered by such politics, you'll be disappointed. For me, it was like buying a murder mystery novel and realize 2/3 through that you got tricked into reading a Communist manifesto, or a Nazi one, or pick your flavor of manifesto. By the end, I was rooting for the bigoted, corporate ass-hole family simply out of a sense of artistic rebellion (even though I typically root for underdogs against the likes of Disney, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and mutli-billionaire CEOs of health companies). Anyway, if you aren't allergic to ideology, the gameplay is fun, and it is fairly well crafted. It was fun to piece together the family tree and learn the history. Some of the characters seemed flat, and that was part of what made me feel less sympathetic. I'd give this a 4/10, but if it hadn't been so one-sided and obvious ideologically. Without that, well, maybe it would have been a 7/10.