The Roottrees are Dead

If you're the target audience for this game, don't even think. Just buy it. If you're not sure, you should try playing TYPE HELP first. It's free on itchio, and I'd say TYPE HELP and Roottrees are some of only a few games in a genre of "True" detective games. ("Return of the Obra Dinn" and "Her Story" being the only other game in this specific genre of puzzle which comes to mind). If you enjoyed TYPE HELP, you will more than get your money's worth from Roottrees. I mention TYPE HELP because the game that the publisher is advertising, "The Incident at Galley House", is an adaptation and continuation of TYPE HELP. The appeal of this type of genre is having very little guidance in deductions, so the core payoff is able to be the satisfaction of discovery. You truly feel as though you are unraveling a mystery: finding the signal in the noise, following trails of clues, wondering if it'll actually lead anywhere, then finally getting your payoff of a correct deduction. The tradeoff for this is search failures: it can be hard to find what clues you missed, because clues aren't clearly marked. Because clues aren't clearly marked, it's hard to know where that missed clue is. In Roottrees, the "intuition" system helps with this, but it's so unclear what the number means that it might as well be a binary "there are clues left / there are not." If those terms don't sound obviously exciting and interesting to you, this may not be the game for you. I say "true" detective game because "detective" games come into problems when the player's understanding clashes with the in-game characters, phoenix wright and danganronpa come to mind. If you don't understand something, you can feel like you're the Watson, watching as Sherlock waits for you to catch up with the mystery. On the other hand, when you understand something that the game didn't expect you to already, there's no way to present that you solved something else in the case. In these games, you're often force to watch the in-game characters get sent on wild goose chases that you've already seen through. "True" detective games don't suffer from this. I think my primary complaint for this game is that the family tree is pre-drawn. It feels a bit contrived that, given the starting conditions as presented, the necessary conclusion is that someone set this tree up, already knowing the entire Roottree genealogy and just wants you to check their work. Like, you know all these peoples' marriages, number of children, and all that but you just didn't want to write the names? The game would be so much more exciting if you were just given the tools to draw out the tree yourself. This would make it harder to know when you're right, and the periodic check-ins verifying your knowledge is a bit fun for sure. However, I think there's just enough information from the given clues for it to be possible, and that sounds so exciting. Clues like "this person had X number of kids" would be actual clues in the mystery then, instead of being like a reverse clue that tells you "this place on the family tree which has already been marked as someone who has had X kids could be that person" instead of being the literal clue of "someone had X number of kids". The occasional check-ins are a necessary evil for a more "frictionless" experience, but it gameifies the deduction just a little more than I'd want it to. There can be a sort of gameplay where you can brute force every 3rd person, if you already have their picture. Of course, you don't want to do that because you're robbing yourself of all the plot threads you'd need to follow to get there in earnest, and there would be a ton (like actually thousands) of options to pick from, but it was always on my mind as an option. A lesser version of that is that you can use it to find out information you're not entirely sure of but are kind of getting the vibe of, which cuts you off from less deduction to give you a smaller progress cheat. However, because they exist, they make it so your own deductions don't feel as valuable. Like, if you have a certain subset of clues figured out, but you don't know which branch of the tree they go on, it feels less valuable. Aside from when I used it to cheat, I don't think I ever felt like the check-ins were ever giving me more certainty over what facts I already knew I had right from other clues, but they make my deductions feel less valuable because I got used to the game telling me when I got things. Spoiler for the ending below [spoiler] Also? I just didn't like the ending very much. I think the final puzzle is super anti-climactic and not that interesting. As per the last paragraph, not being told, using the language of the game, that I got that last deduction correct made the ending feel like a huge anti-climax. The sheer fact that all of the clues necessary for solving the ending puzzle just so happen to appear somewhere that you probably get the majority of the whole game's clues from the same evidence that you get the majority of the whole game's clues from makes it severely less interesting. There's no deduction there. [/spoiler] Minor gameplay spoiler The other main issue I have is that the internet dialogue can feel a tiny bit contrived, to the point of making me less interested in searching things. I get that the idea is to avoid there being a billion red herrings and dead time (for the dev and players), and I don't know of a better way to do this, but being told something like searching for [spoiler] "Roottree Chocolate" [/spoiler] or [spoiler] "ROOT. Catalogs" [/spoiler] doesn't give me ANY results relevant to the search is just weird. I genuinely missed clues because I got tired of searching on terms which returned blank pages. Last nitpick, I understand that the pictures are necessary to require you to understand certain plot point and have therefore found certain pieces evidence. However, in terms of the actual motivations of the player's character, they are functionally useless. You don't need to know how someone looks for the genealogy to be tracked. It leads to a feeling of mismatch between me and the in-game character where I simply need to scour the internet for one picture of some random guy, meanwhile the character has no reason to care what someone looks like. Very good game though.