The Roottrees Are Dead is a nostalgic sleuthing simulator and an ADHD-hyperfocus stimulator. As a research junkie with fond memories of the late 90s, I thought it might be fun -- and then it consumed my brain. There are no unmarked spoilers in this review.

In 1998, the fifth president of the Roottree Corporation and his heirs perish in a tragic plane crash. Due to a quirk of the family trust, you're tasked with identifying the first president's blood descendents using only dial-up internet, a list of names, and intuition. Set aside 6 - 8 hours to solve the original Roottree mystery.

Your actions have consequences, and the Roottrees return in Roottreemania (included): now it's 1999, and they need your help navigating a complex web of buried secrets, dead ends, and red herrings. You have only the barest of clues to start with, more leads to chase, more mysteries to unravel, and another 12 - 16 hours of investigating ahead of you.

Gameplay requires a mouse and keyboard, and revolves around taking notes in an in-game notebook while muttering to yourself and rotating between three screens: the family tree where you identify Roottrees by their birth name, occupation, and photo; an evidence table where you clip images and peruse printed documents or other physical materials (because it's the 90s!); and a clunky old desktop where you "SpiderSearch" every remotely interesting term on "NetScrape Explorer," browse periodicals, or play minigames.

I realize this sounds like homework, but the overall experience is more akin to diving down research rabbitholes while watching reality TV.

✅ Art. The Steam edition of Roottrees swaps out the browser game's AI art for portraits by Henning Ludvigsen, a board game artist you might know from Betrayal at House on the Hill (3rd Ed), Blood Rage, or the phenomenal Android: Netrunner. As a result, squinting at jawlines and eyebrows to identify characters is a perfectly valid strategy.

✅ Deduction. If you get stuck, you can ask your rubber duck for a hint or two -- but they’re only hints. Similarly, some information is directly stated in articles, but the game has no interest in holding your hand; you have to make logical deductions and occasional leaps of logic, and might not know until the credits roll if you were right.

✅ Depth + Humor. I would 100% watch a Netflix reality show or docudrama about the Roottrees; each and every one is delightfully weird in their own special way, the summarized search results are often funny, and it's incredible how much content there is to find.

✅ Locking In. When you correctly identify 3+ persons of interest, their profiles "lock in." It's often easy to pin down two folks at once, but getting three or more takes a while, and -- in the red herring-infested waters of Roottreemania especially -- the space between confirmations leaves you second guessing everything and diving deeper into the madness.

✅ Sound Design. The background music is noticeable but not distracting, and helped keep my ADHD brain in Research Mode. There's also five (5) original songs to discover across the two games, and some are catchy.

❎ Replayability. After replaying 1/3 of the base game to score an achievement (to avoid the same fate, do not answer the phone), I can say this isn't very replayable. The family tree is always the same, and half the fun is chasing every possible lead as far as you can.

❎ Roottreemania ends with a single (but juicy) loose end and an offhand remark about a possible sequel, and yet the studio's newly announced next game is not Roottreemania 2.

You lament that this incredibly vital information wasn't available months ago, when it truly mattered.

At time of writing, I'm sitting on 100% achievements, a slew of funny screenshots that I can't share because spoilers, a real-life spiralbound notebook full of grids and timelines (the in-game one wasn't cutting it at a certain point), and a desperate need for more.

I had so much fun with this even when it felt like I was finding nothing but dead ends, or when a certain minigame seriously tested my patience. It felt like diving into a wiki or going down a rabbithole on the original Cracked website (RIP), while still staying true to the pre-Y2K aesthetic and challenging you to really think things through.

I waited for a sale, but this is the rare game that I would've been happy to pay full price for. If you enjoy point-and-click management games like Papers Please and/or real-life cybersleuthing, I think you'll have a lot of fun with Roottrees.

That said, most of the game involves reading and parsing chunks of text, and making inferences from available information. If pretending to be a digital Sherlock Holmes doesn't sound like a good time, then you can probably skip this one.

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