It’s The 90’s. You, the Genealogy Genie, are just figuring out how your new Cashew computer can help you untangle family trees, when a newsflash comes up on your TV: The Roottrees are Dead. The current scion of the family-run company has died in a plane crash, along with his wife and daughters. The Roottree candy empire and its fashion company offshoot may be world-famous, but this hardly affects you. Then there’s a knock at the door, and a mysterious woman offers you a generous reward for figuring out the complex history of the Roottrees – and all their buried secrets.

I have to wonder at this point if we might be seeing the Golden Age of mystery video games. This little niche of gaming has seen a lot of fascinating and varied entries in recent years, mostly springing from dedicated independent developers. I’d say it kicked off in the mid 2010s, when Her Story and The Return of the Obra Dinn were released.
If you’re familiar with those games, The Roottrees are Dead takes the search interface from Her Story and pairs it with the name-and-picture matching of Obra Dinn. The “core loop” is this: starting with a few breadcrumbs, you then search the late-90s internet for hits, and your results are summarized. Your search might result in just text, or may uncover a magazine archive to search, or if you’re really lucky you’ll find a picture. Pictures are important, because the family tree you’re filling in on your corkboard lets you select names and occupations from a long list of options, but the only options for pictures are ones you’ve found in your searches.

One of the more difficult parts of the game is keeping track of all the phrases and names you need to search – it won’t track them for you! There’s a handy notebook feature to keep snippets of your searches, which I found essential to remind me of what I’d found.
It’s interesting that both the search terms being very specific and the need to find pictures serve as gates to your progress. I felt the difficulty of the first case was a satisfyingly smooth progression, from making easy progress to digging around for obscure websites in the hopes of one of them having a photograph.

The notebook does actually link into the presentation of the game, which I really liked. It’s very skeumorphic, so the family tree is actually paper and pins on corkboard, the evidence is all laid out on your desk, and the search interface is actually your computer, complete with dial-up tones to get on the internet and a chunky CRT screen. All the “photos” in the game are actually drawn by the artist Henning Ludvigsen. You may or may not be familiar with his work on the recent version of Clue/Cluedo. The realistic style works very well for the game, and it’s a huge improvement over the AI art used for the original, created-in-a-week game jam version. I have to commend Robin Ward for picking up that version and making this improved and expanded version happen.

Despite the presentation, though, the majority of the game content is actually text; from your mysterious client, from the search summaries, and extracts from the articles you’re reading. The writing is good – it’s clear that writer Jeremy Johnston is skilled at mimicking various different styles of writing from different publications. He also manages to maintain the verisimilitude of the story-world – I didn’t feel like the presentation of the facts felt unnatural in their context. Of course it does help that the information is presented in summary, implying the Genealogy Genie has picked out the most relevant bits of the articles they’re reading. This summary layer has a pleasingly snarky tone at times – not every obscure website owner gets to pass without judgement.
On the whole, the game is a great example of building up characters through brief descriptions and snippets of speech.

For puzzle fiends, I should talk about where the challenge comes from. There are sometimes a few deductions and leaps of logic to make, but the game doesn’t push this aspect very far for the first case – saving it for the conclusion to the case. Instead, the challenge comes from testing your searching skills. Can you connect this new information with old information in order to mine out new facts? If there isn’t much information online, might an archive or the library be able to help you?

This does change somewhat with the second case – completely new to the commercial release of the game. The first case had you figure out the “official” family tree, but the second focuses on the illegitimate children that any Roottrees may have had. The difficulty level here begins pretty much where the first case left off. The trails are more obscure, and I had to do a lot more puzzling out in order to figure out the answers. I also noticed a slight change in writing style. The extracts were longer, and, when pieced together, served as interesting stories in their own right. Little logical puzzles are also woven seamlessly into the text. Each disconnected illegitimate tree also plays with a different wrinkle in the business of figuring out family trees, such as adoption and a serial philanderer.

I had a fantastic 15 hours with the game – even though I got totally stuck at times (the game does have a hint system, which I stubbornly refused to use, though there’s no reason not to). I love doing research in real life (as you can sometimes tell from my reviews…) and it’s hard to imagine a game more tailor-made for me. I may not have been on the internet in 1998, but the simplicity of the 90s Internet setting was very appealing. I happily immersed myself in this interesting world through its online portal. This game is worth anyone checking out – even if you played the original version. It may just turn out that my favourite game 2025 was released right at the start of the year.