Platform:
PC
Released:
January 15, 2025
Publisher:
Robin Ward
Developer:
Jjohnstongames
The Roottrees are Dead is an investigation game that requires real-life research skills. Originally released on itch.io for the Global Game Jam 2023 by solo dev Jeremy Johnstone, the Steam release has all-new illustrations, voice acting, a general improvement to UI and search functions, and an additional gameplay section called “Roottreemania” that unlocks after you finish the main game. Don’t let its low-budget look fool you into missing out on this rewarding, well-written detective game.
Set in 1998, it begins with the breaking news that the president of the wealthy Roottree Candy Company, Carl Roottree, has perished in a sudden plane crash along with his wife and three daughters. You might think your task is to find out what really happened to them, but this is the rare mystery where an accident really is just an accident. No, your task is not to find “whodunnit”, but to identify each and every blood descendant of the family founders in order to determine who is entitled to a piece of the inheritance.
“The sheer number of names to be filled… made me rub my hands with delight.”
You have the most cutting-edge technology of 1998: a chunky home computer, internet access using AOL, and a home laser printer that can print out your evidence in full colour. So how do you find the clues you need to link the family together? The same way you’d do it in real life, of course: Google as many keywords and phrases as you can find! (or “SpiderSearch” as the case may be). Styled to look like a real search result, the text will describe what relevant information you find, if any. It’s totally intuitive, meaning it’s easy to launch into your investigation. You also have at your disposal the online archive of various publications and books, which may reveal more in-depth evidence than a SpiderSearch can tell you. You need to use all of them in combination to find all the clues: articles, advertisements, books, diaries, magazine covers, old photos, songs, interviews, and more. It’s incredibly extensive. The visuals are all very simple, which makes sense for the software — the internet back then did look pretty bare-bones — but it makes the game’s main UI look a bit cheap. Contrasted against the extremely detailed photo evidence and magazine covers, it’s a bit of an odd look. The note-taking system is functional enough to be useful, but gets hard to navigate the more you use it, and while you can press CTRL+C to copy keyphrases, it doesn’t always work across your various databases. It’s inconsistent enough that I never understood when to expect a copy to work or not. This stuff is unlikely to bother you for long, though, because the game is just so engrossing.
When you think you know a family member’s name, face, occupation, and place on the family tree, you can fill in your conspiracy-style corkboard and the game will lock them in as soon as you have three correct.
The sheer number of names to be filled in might daunt some, but for me it made me rub my hands with delight. First of all, the history of the Roottree Candy Company is fascinating on its own, while still being grounded in reality; there’s no supernatural goings-on here. Researching a new lead can quickly open a brand new rabbit hole so deep that you can get fully absorbed by them. One such rabbit hole is the many conspiracy theories surrounding the Roottrees, while another concerns the short stardom of Jim Roottree’s roller-disco one-hit-wonder, and his short-lived band with his cousin Clark Roottree.
Sometimes the rabbit holes can lead to hidden humour, too, which feels like a reward for doing some extra research. One of the record covers of Clark Roottree’s songs features a quote from a magazine that says, “Folk-style songwriting… catchy…”. If you bother to look up the song in the magazine’s archive, you can find that the full quote is actually, “Amateurish folk-style songwriting is catchy at times, but ultimately doesn’t do anything new.” Does that help you solve the family tree? Not at all, but it sure is hilarious.
One clear inspiration for this game is “The Return of Obra Dinn” (I caught that hidden reference, Jeremy!), but a more relevant inspiration is likely Sam Barlow, whose games Her Story and Immortality also involve assembling a larger story out of little bits and pieces. Even if what you find doesn’t give you a useful clue, it will flesh out the world. In essence, you are just exploring the online records of a fictional 90s. Sure, it’s all focused on the Roottree family, but the background details paint the rest of the world into the backdrop so it all feels real.
Oh yeah, researching is hard
One of the things I adore about The Roottrees Are Dead is also something that got me frustrated. I love that you can find more clues by simply searching for the same keyphrase in the relevant archives, but it can be a double-edged sword. When you’ve searched the right keyphrase in the right database, but the wrong publication, it can lead you to a false dead end. Some of these are justified; if you searched for the 1950s actress Gwynn Rottree in “Business Watch” instead of “Starlet”, that might be on you, but not all leads have such an obvious category. The result is copying and pasting the keyword into every single publication just to find a possible hit, which gets old mighty fast.
The additional content, “Roottreemania”, exacerbates this issue by adding even more publications to search in. Set several months after the main game, it deals with the after-effects of your discoveries. As time has moved on and the famous family has had to deal with the unpleasant limelight, many of the same articles you pored through in the main game have been updated with new information, opinion pieces, and news releases. I want to love this dose of realism, but in practice, this means you now have to struggle to remember which family members you need to re-visit, vs. the ones you already have re-visited. The mystery behind Roottreemania is as compelling as the main game, so it’s still well worth playing through, just maybe not straight after the main story.
8.5
Great
Positive:
- A richly fascinating yet believable family history just waiting to be uncovered
- Finding new information feels rewarding even when it doesn't result in a new clue
- Quality of life improvements to controls makes your cyber-sleuthing easier
- The new "Roottreemania" content adds an additional compelling mystery to solve
Negative:
- Sorting through your evidence and notes can get painful
- Revisiting old articles in Roottreemania is a good idea in theory, less so in practice
The Roottrees Are Dead is a triumph of investigative fiction, offering a compelling yet grounded family mystery within countless articles, websites, and archives waiting for you to uncover. The game has been much improved over its original iteration on itch.io, and the extra content “Roottreemania” adds a cool follow-up mystery to the main one. Any fan of investigation games will have a great time with The Roottrees are Dead.
About the Author
Edie W-K
she/her
If it isn't video games, Edie doesn't care about it. She's been playing games since the N64 era, and only spent enough time away from her 3DS to earn a Bachelor in Games Design from RMIT.
