So, I really like the first part of the game, the original "The Roottrees are Dead". I enjoyed it a lot and it seemed fair and interesting, self-contained and fun. Also original.
Really, the time I spent with that part of the game was a blast. I was tracking relations, finding more sources, and sometimes I was even ahead of the game revealing more information to me on figuring out who's who.
At this point I didn't mind so much the game's approach to having to guess the exactly right search terms or gating some of the content behind blindly following some evidence behind chasing down every link, no matter how obscure and silly, and at the same time casting shade at the player often when they did so in other cases. Because I had fun and it felt rewarding.
The follow-up story, "Roottreemania", became a real drag. It's a definite step (or several) up in difficulty, and I was often sitting in front of the game, stuck, wondering what other threads to follow. The game also throws a lot of more of the same at you, and not in fun ways. You have to reinvestigate some of the people you already did before, which is a tedious needle-in-the-haystack "bonus." You hunt down also updated versions of the articles you already read. At least the game flags old and new versions.
I soured on the second part, ramping up the tedious aspect of the game while no longer feeling as rewarding as the first. The momentum of "The Roottrees are Dead" is definitely gone by "Roottreemania", though I have to say that the story is still top-notch.
It's good that the game has a hint system, but the hints often only make you fill out which articles or web posts you have not found, at least in the second part. In the first part it seemed more helpful as well.
One not-so-helpful addition is the "counting of clues" on the evidence. Each piece of evidence gets a counter of how many leads it contains that you have yet to uncover, so supposedly the number goes down. But I think only if you successfully lock in something. Very often, the "evidence" is actually less useful for understanding the story - and contains less leads - than the articles, books, and web posts do. So if they had such a system, even if optional, for hunting the dangling ends in online media then this would have been much easier and more helpful.
The interface takes me back to the good ole days of Netscape, but is at times considerably less useful. At least that means the game never really floods you with information to sift through (like "What happened to the crew?" does, for example).
Another aspect that is not so great is that it is hard to predict which line of investigation is stalled - you sometimes cannot proceed until more evidence is revealed at regular intervals - or if you are missing a clue. This is less an issue in the first part because more redundant sources of information exist - I was able to verify the identity of several people from indirect clues that were not as clear as later versions, by elimination of other options, etc. This "more than one thread" approach is largely gone by the second part of the game, and some progress in the investigation is gated by batches of additional information. This makes the game hinge on that one piece of information at several times which actually introduces more problems and stalling. Yes, it makes the game more hard, but it introduces an unneeded problem of many interactive fiction and point-and-click games under the guise of difficulty, and that [i]after doing better than that in the first part[/i].
So, get the game for the first half, enjoy that, you'll be rewarded. Engage with the second, totally optional part at your own "risk." You need to be a real sleuth for the second one, even if you are presented with a very well organized set of information at the end. (Such a system for tracking information would not have been amiss earlier in the game, either).
And finally: [spoiler]I hated having to find the Springfield that matches the TV station. If the game had a system for narrowing down searches that made sense, this would be a great addition. Instead it was just a "sticking together search terms" madness. Same goes for having to search every name in every variation, with every nickname, alternate monicker, in every source, over and over. You're really bound to miss some unless you have either really good record keeping or a process. But here the hint system helps. And guessing which sibling is oldest from photos didn't work for me at all when the sister looks like she could be in college.[/spoiler]
