Do you remember a simpler time, when trying to search for things online was tricky for more fun, innocent reasons? When search engines weren’t full of AI poison, your personal data wasn’t stolen every time you tried to buy socks, and playing a five minute video only required five hours of buffering first? OK, so maybe it wasn’t all great, but The Roottrees Are Dead, a detective game set in 1998, certainly is. I’d seriously rate this one alongside The Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden idol.
A quick warning: the following article does contain some spoilers for the early stages of the game’s mystery. I’ve avoided revealing too much, but if you want to go in completely fresh, I won’t be offended if you click away now, as long as you promise to go play it right away.
After a plane crash has tragically killed several of the Roottree clan, a mysterious shadowy figure assigns you with filling out their family tree. To help with your investigation you’ve got a single photograph and access to 1998’s hottest search engine, SpiderSearch. Appropriately enough, SpiderSearch is about as forgiving of human error as a black widow. It demands perfect spelling and offers no suggestions when your results come up empty. But SpiderSearch also never forces an AI bot upon you that falsely assures you the Roottrees are actually alive and well. So that’s nice.
The game starts with a test. You need to identify the three Roottree sisters who perished in the plane crash. You’ve got to find their names, jobs, photos, and put them in order on the family tree from oldest to youngest.
Check your evidence and you’ll find a photograph from a shoot the three sisters did for a ‘Got Milk?’ ad campaign, which frustratingly isn’t labelled with their names and ages. But I can intuit from the fact they’re modelling for an ad campaign that they’re probably models. I’m a genius.
I try a SpiderSearch of ‘Rootree Sisters’, followed by some swearing and a second SpiderSearch where I remember that second ‘t’ in ‘Roottree’. This finds me a Roottree Sisters fansite a teenager has made. It’s a little disappointing that the game just gives you a summary rather than taking you to a fansite it’s made (luckily if I want to play a detective game with a full fake internet in it, I can find that elsewhere).
Still, even secondhand, I love reading about the fansites’ excruciating details, like how apparently ‘it’s neon pink with purple text, and hard to read until you highlight the words’. More helpfully, the fan has also written “Rhayna is the most famous because she’s the oldest and got married to TMS. But Rhiley is the smart one. Rhose is a middle child like me!” Jackpot!
Hang on… there is no Rhose Roottree? I can’t believe something I read on the internet wasn’t true. After some more productive swearing, I go crawling back to the fansite summary and read more about how the Roottrees mother owns a fashion line, ROOT., that the girls model for. A SpiderSearch of ROOT gets me nothing but a patronising reminder that root is a very common word. God dammit…
Luckily, a search of ‘ROOT.’ with that crucial full stop on the end gets me what I need. More background on the clothing line, including details about a rare catalogue from 1985, where apparently: ‘this was the only time her daughter was ever listed with her birth name, Carly Roottree.’ Bingo!
Now I just need to put faces to my three names. Returning to the fansite summary gets me more teenage gushing: “[I] try to dress in plaid ROOT. clothes like Rhiley does in most of the posters! Someday I want to get my ears pierced like Rhose!” Um, don’t you mean Carly? You call yourself a true fan?
Boo-yah indeed! Ignore the fact I didn’t get any optional entries. It’s early days, leave me alone. Having passed this test, the real game begins. I now have to fill out all fifty Roottrees on the family tree. Like in Obra Dinn, I’ll only know I’m on the right track and not just filling the tree with nonsense and guesswork when I get three accurate entries.
I’ve gained two new tools as well. A public library database where I can look up books so long as I have the title and author name. And a periodical archive, where I can look up things in whatever magazines and newspapers I find during my sleuthing (handily, there’s literally one in the key art of the game, as you can see at the top of this article).
I’ve always preferred the Golden Idol games a little to Obra Dinn, simply because I can’t get enough of their horrible casts of backstabbing power hungry murderers. While from what I’ve played, the Roottree clan don’t seem quite that cutthroat, there’s still plenty of bitchy melodrama, lawsuits, judgemental books, and delightfully petty grievances to sink my gossip-loving teeth into. There’s tons of character here that stops it from ever just feeling like a dry game of fill-in-the-blanks.
Still, there have definitely been points where I want to give up. Where I couldn’t seem to find photos of a branch of the family no matter what I angrily typed at that damn spider. But then I’d hit another goldmine in a book or magazine article, and suddenly have a bunch of promising new leads to whittle down. Considering you spend 90% of this game staring at a corkboard, it’s incredible how much it hooks you in. Any fan of detective games should look this one up immediately.
Still not convinced by my fansite-style gushing? Try the free version that this is a fantastic expansion of and that PC Gamer scored 86 in the Free Games section of the magazine (our full online review of the new version is on the way). Sorry you had to go, Roottrees, but I hope the fact you’ve starred in such a great game helps your surviving relatives appreciate your deaths were totally worth it. RIP!
