The Roottrees are Dead

I honestly never do reviews for a game, but I absolutely had to for TRaD. My Wife and I played it together and couldn't get enough of it. We'd sit and play it, get our children thru dinner and off to bed, talking about it the whole time. Then go right back to it when they went to bed! It's a super addicting, very well written puzzle/detective game of deduction and we couldn't hardly stop playing it. I can't recommend it enough to anyone who wants a brain scratcher of a game, and has a partner to figure out the Roottree family's history. Playing solo would be just fine, but it's all the more enjoyable having someone you can't help but discuss your finding with. Happy Hunting!! (To the Dev: Please, for the love of all that is good in life. Make another game like this and thicken the Roottree 'blood/syrup' (-; My wife and I, NEED MORE! lol)

Somewhere between Hypnospace Outlaws and The Case of the Golden Idol, this game exists. A excellent puzzle that made me really invested into the Roottree family.

适合一鼓作气一下子全部打完 不然真的脑子记不住。。。分几个月打到80%之后全都忘光了。。。看到旧时代的女性一个个家庭主妇，新时代女性各个职业百花齐放真的非常感慨。推荐

I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it many more times in the future: I do not like Steam's Thumb Up/Thumbs Down rating system. I wish I could give a more nuanced vote, but if I had to chose between either recommending Roottrees or not, I'd have to say "no". I'm conflicted because the concept of trawling through old articles online to piece together a narrative is very compelling and the process of solving the puzzles can be quite enjoyable at times. When you have all the information required to get to the next step of putting together the family tree, deductions come along easily and follow a very logical flow. There wasn't a single part of the game where I felt like I had to make a huge leap in my thinking to progress. Thinking back after having beaten the game, however, I think this may be a failing on the part of the writers. I was never confused because all the necessary clues were given in a way that was impossible to misinterpret, almost all of them being presented in a formal and very dry manner. Saying "X person did thing Y at time Z" is good for gameplay purposes, because it keeps the pace of puzzle solving quick so the player never gets frustrated, but the act of reading such information isn't fun in itself, which takes a lot of the joy out of coming to a conclusion. Towards the end I was guessing names, not because the puzzles are hard (they are actually much easier than games of a similar style such as Obra Dinn and Case of the Golden Idol), but because I simply wasn't interested in rereading through walls of dull prose. Information in Roottrees is gathered by going through the backlogs of various newspapers, websites, and magazines, all of which, including what the game tells us are gossip rags, are staffed by journalists of the highest ethical standard who rarely embellish and never knowingly repeat a falsehood. This makes the world of the game feel very sterile and constantly took me out of the story in addition to making reading through these pages a chore, as there was little variety in writing style, with Hollywood scandal magazines reporting on hidden affairs with the same level of passion as an article describing how the local autobody shop changed owners. This is not helped by a lack of characterization for most of the cast. Only a handful of the fifty Roottrees that must be placed on the family tree get any kind of identifiable personality traits, and those that do are so two-dimensional they barely qualify as stereotypes. The old patriarch of the family is very traditional and is a misogynist. The TV Evangelist is a scummy scam artist. The smug rich guy isn't actually that good at doing business. I'm basically giving you as much characterization as the game provides with my one-sentence descriptors. You may read these and think that, while uninteresting on their own, they may at least have engaging interactions with one another, but you would be wrong, as characters never really interact. The clinical writing style only gives you a minimal and dispassionate summary of an interaction that occurred offscreen. There is an attempt to correct for this by the occasional inclusion of a line about how this one Woman is a failed writer of trashy romantic fiction, but it doesn't add anything to a character if I just list some factoid about them that bears no relevance to the story. Example: I have written a character named Frank just now. He can juggle. Are you intrigued by my presentation? If not, you will find yourself similarly disinterested with the members of the Roottree family. These issues may have been ignored entirely if the overarching mystery to which all these non-characters belonged was interesting. After all, the fantastic Return of the Obra Dinn had very little in the way of character, with a good portion of the cast of that game not getting even a single spoken line. So what is the mystery of The Roottrees are Dead? It's who is related to whom. That's it. That's the whole mystery. If you are wondering what the game's title, The Roottrees are Dead, is referring to, it is the completely ordinary and definitely non-criminal death of five members of the Roottree family at the start of the game, a detail which is unimportant to the plot that, by the time I hit the credits about six hours in, I was surprised when I saw the name of the game because I had totally forgotten that the Roottrees were dead in the game named The Roottrees are Dead. Also, your job in the plot of this game is to double check the work that someone else already did, so there are no twists in the plot or even really developments. Things end more or less where they begin. There is one minor detail that is changed by the involvement of the player character, when a final mystery is revealed after completing the rest of the genealogy, which the game treats as a twist even though it happened to a guy who had only been mentioned offhand a couple times and had no personality because he had zero presence in the plot until that exact moment. I don't know if the game was trying to invoke empathy for this dude I just met but, aside from being frustrated that I had to dig through a bunch of bland files with walls of text and no good way of finding the one key term I needed with no good way of filtering through my evidence, my only thought was "So what?" When I play a mystery game, I expect a game that is half puzzle and half story. While the puzzle elements of Roottrees are competently put together, the story feels like it barely exists. Trying to tie together the game with a story so barebones makes me wonder why they even bothered adding a story in the first place. There is a famous quote from developer of Doom and known cybermancer John Carmack which goes something like, "Plot in a game is like a plot in porn: You expect it to be there, but its not what you come for." For an action focused game like Cultic or The Citadel, a lack of story is fine, preferred even. For a game that is basically a visual novel, I feel like the writing should be a higher priority. If I want a raw puzzle, I'd rather go for something without all the fat of Roottrees, like Pictopix, or which uses its mechanics in a more fun and varied way, like Strange Jigsaws. Bottom line: The Roottrees are Dead feels like a compromise that didn't need to be made.

谁不想酣畅淋漓来一场家族秘辛吃瓜推理大戏

I enjoyed this game for the most part but there are some puzzles that kind of sour the whole experience for me. There is a very good mechanism for hints in the game, and it will even explain the logic and there were two times where I was like... "Ok, I sort of know it must be like this, but solving it based on this would be ABSOLUTE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ so I am going to keep looking for the information, I trust this game has hidden it somewhere interesting" Only to come up frustrated, asking the game for a hint, and it tells you "Oh, you could know this because THE ABSOLUTE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ THING YOU FIGURED OUT HOURS AGO THAT SHOULD NOT BE USED AS A PUZZLE ELEMENT" I will not spoil what it is but... it feels like the equivalent of the game telling you "Ah, you could know because you could have gone in the files and looked at the filename of this picture" or something like... "Oh you could have known this person is Justin because, come on, look at his face, man. that's such a Justin, bro" There were two really egregious ones, and then like... maybe 3 or 4 more cases like this where... I would have liked to dig deeper and find a real answer instead of just assuming some stuff but I can kind of give them a pass... It also means that if you have been told this is like "Return of the Obra Dinn"... it is not because in return of the Obra Dinn, there were many cases where you COULD assume "Ok, it's most likely this" but if you really dug deep, there were actual ironclad or very close to ironclad hints to back you up if you felt like you wanted to be sure and in this game the hint system literally tells you "well, this looks like this so it's safe to assume" and I'm sitting there "Like ♥♥♥♥ it is"

So I absolutely love this game! The base game is 10/10. I do agree with others that Roottreemania is a little confusing and some of hte connections big leaps. Like one of the characters was listed as "unmarried" with a child and there were two areas that could fit. However, the rubber ducky gave a hint that it was the "divorced" family branch, not just unmarried... Other than that, its a great game and I am excited for Incident at Galley House!

As someone that doesn't play many adventure games I really got into researching the truth and history behind this deep and complex family tree chart. The second part was a little weaker but it had moments.

The gameplay is great but the story is kind of vindictive, mean-spirited, and angry. It makes playing the second part hard to play. It takes an obvious anti family (at least rich/traditional family) bent and has an even more obvious message heavily controlled in the authors bias. Taking a biased all old school families fathers never actually loved their wife and kids. They were just obsessed with legacy and money. [spoiler] The main reason I do say all that is it has an uncritical view of Sam's action and even has a character validate all she does as being 100% perfect and should not be question more then superficially. This is a fictional story and every aspect of fiction is obviously made up by the writer/author. That always going to be the case but how it is done is very important. In this the story perfectly meets all requirement to meet the author personal worldviews and grips with their view on rich families as being hollow and 99% artificial. It's obtrusive. I literally said out loud saw that coming a mile away (about the E.C. "twist" and family skeletons) but hey at least they didn't go crazy making everyone one a cheating abuser. Only to be shut up by the second half of the game. To go back a second they hype up a big secret two characters that you're gonna have to figure out by taking everything you learned and putting the pieces together to find these 2 in the cracks of the Roottree's family history. Only for ALL of the evidence to come from 2 linked books and photograph and the Photo barely attempts to hide the extra face. It literally spells out the name for E.C. in the "hint" in the book. It's so bad it a wonder why there wasn't a gif of someone winking none stop at you for minutes on end after the mail hint is shown. Also basically just outright say E.C. is gay with little room for misinterpretation. It's not at all a challenge worth the hype. The all the spouse names were much harder to notice (except john miller) . For god sake they thought hiding E.C. gay lover with the term roommate. It's pathetic. This gameplay format is great, the in moment discovery of something useful without any hand holding is amazing. However it drag so far down with this vindictive self gratifying story. Like how there is no redeeming qualities of Elias Roottree or any credit given to them for building the foundations of all the vast wealth and comfort the families. There it's not "he was a successful man, but a man of his times and a flawed man". Just a omg he such bigot ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pos father. Also hints he has no love of family, just a perverted sense of "BLOOD". Plus he only care about the dudes side, ♥♥♥♥ women. Sam is such a hero, perfect, amazing girl that is so valid in burning it all down omg so good. Also the gay aunt that is suppose to be this liberating figure, just comes off as a hugely vile pos. In fact the more 70s liberal they are the more heck'n valid they are and the more 1920-50 traditional or "of their times" they are the more hollow fake and two faced they are. With exception to the females. This is all fiction which means it all in control of the author. To be so unambiguous and to lack any nuanced characterization of most of the cast is terrible and boring writing. [/spoiler] Anyway this gameplay is great (story sucks) and would work perfectly for a more traditional murder mystery or even better a conspiracy story. Both even.

神了。想起高中英语考试做阅读理解，看完一遍正文之后答题发现所有的选项都能严丝合缝地对上，那种爽感再乘上 100 倍，就是玩这个游戏的感觉。