The Roottrees are Dead

Wikipedia link hopping, the game! I love "The Roottrees are Dead" so much that I regularly check what the developers are up to and purchased their second game, "The Incident at Galley House", the day it came out. If you have ever stayed awake at night reading Wikipedia articles on random topics because your insomnia has a death grip on you: you will like this game. If you have ever pulled your phone out at a restaurant to find a research article you read years ago to prove something as fact: you will enjoy this game. If you make excel spreadsheets for fun, considered getting an ancestry.com subscription, or have run out of major puzzle games ("Return of the Obra Dinn", "The Case of the Golden Idol", "Outer Wilds", "Blue Prince", etc.): you will LOVE this game. There's a warm sense of satisfaction you get while putting the pieces together, the overarching mystery doesn't hit boring lulls because you choose how many side details you want to read, and the game has an actually helpful notepad function. It's point-and-click for any fellow first-person nausea havers and the music didn't scrape my brain after hours of playthrough. It has its flaws, but if given the opportunity to forget everything about this game just so I could play it again with fresh eyes, I would not hesitate. Enjoy!

The Roottrees Are Dead is essentially one giant deduction puzzle centered around investigating the Roottree family using an in-game internet, research, and collected clues. This also brought back some nostalgia from elementary school, as it reminded me of those logic puzzles where you had to figure out the order of gummy bears (or other objects) based on the clues provided. This is a similar style of puzzle, except dramatically more complex and far more satisfying to solve. I also really liked how the game validates your answers in batches. It gives you enough confirmation to keep making progress while preventing you from simply brute-forcing random guesses across the entire family tree. It strikes a nice balance between rewarding correct deductions and preserving the challenge. I have only completed the main game so far and have not yet played Roottreemania, but the main experience alone was incredibly satisfying. I plan to come back to Roottreemania! If you enjoy detective games, deduction puzzles, or piecing together information from multiple sources, this is an easy recommendation

I absolutely loved playing this game. From the dialup sound when you connect to the internet, all the way to the ending... I was hooked. I also truly enjoyed the little notes from the developer hidden in some of the content. I CRAVE MORE