I hate to do it again, but… It really feels as if Return of the Obra Dinn was a monumental release. For how many fantastic investigative games existed prior to it, its influence on almost all best investigation focused adventure games since is impossible to miss. But that doesn’t mean that said titles lack identity – usually it’s the opposite and they feel fresh and unique, despite utilizing several key elements canonized by Obra Dinn. And The Roottrees are Dead is no exception – this game pulls more direct influences from the older adventure games that presented themselves as real crime dossiers and asked you to use actual internet websites to unravel its mysteries. And it’s really awesome.
At the core of the game is an investigation into the family tree of the titular Roottrees – a family with rich history is a tangled mess of better and lesser known members that is tied to a lot of money. As an unnamed investigator in the 90s, you’re tasked with uncovering every single link in the provided family tree, giving each empty question mark slot a name, a face and an occupation. To do so you will use the in-game internet and library resources. And the documents and other pieces of media that you usually get through the internet. With the confirmation system working via the system popularised by Obra Dinn – only when several entries are fully complete does the game confirm your assumptions and locks them.
It’s a very simple, yet very engaging process of sifting through information you can find, searching for different keywords you can use to find more, occasionally stumbling upon goldmines of useful information and sometimes spending some research time to get to a dead end. Depending on how good you are at this sort of thing and if you use the helpful elements game provides (like showing if you’ve found everything you needed from a certain piece of evidence), it may take you up to 15 hours or so, if not more. And yet it almost never gets boring. The second part of the story in this remake, Roottreemania, is a bit too complex for its own good with some ideas and concepts and the way it reuses old information is sometimes unintuitive. Yet it’s also very good and provides a fun conclusion to the whole experience.
Oh and yes, you read it right – “remake”. Technically, The Roottrees are Dead was originally released without Roottreemania as a free game several years ago and even back then it got a lot of positive reviews. But it was full of generative AI pictures, being a solo game developer work, and many (myself included) completely ignored the title because of that. This new version has nice illustrations instead, and, from what I’ve seen, is just nicer to play. Interestingly, even this version had a change of some character visuals after the release (including the one you see with the newspaper that says the title of the game).
Overall, I’ve had a blast playing The Roottrees are Dead, even though I had all helpers disabled and didn’t use hints. It did get a bit too much by the end of the overall more complex and confusing Roottreemania, but even so I didn’t regret my decision and loved the experience. If you like investigation focused adventure games, especially if you’ve already enjoyed other “Obra Dinn”-inspired identity revealing titles before, it’s absolutely worth playing.