It’s way past midnight, I’m chugging an ill-advised late-night coffee, and I’m intensely tapping my fingers, pondering what to type into a fake ‘90s-era search engine. I tell myself I’ll call it a night after I find one more lead confirming another relative’s place on their family tree. I would spend many evenings reciting the same lie to myself. The Roottrees Are Dead is an investigative mystery game that captivated, surprised, stumped, and, occasionally, infuriated me. It also became my first obsession of 2025.
Set in 1998, the president of a successful candy and fashion empire, his wife, and his three celebrity teenage daughters tragically perish in a plane crash. These are the Roottrees, and they hail from a generationally wealthy family whose corporate empire dates back to the late 19th century. You control an investigator hired by a mysterious client to uncover every blood relative of the Roottrees to piece together their family tree for an unknown purpose. The premise immediately hooked me, and the ensuing mystery rewarded my curiosity.
The internet is your primary tool to fill an expansive family tree with a relative’s birth name, photo, and occupation. Similar to games like Her Story, punching search terms into an internet search engine, a library database, or various magazine/newspaper archives unearths evidence such as diaries, photographs, and even music tracks, which yields new clues to search. It’s an engrossing exercise, not only because I feel like a real sleuth trying to expose the truth, but because the information revealed along the way is fascinating. The Roottree family is an eclectic mess of a clan whose relationships are mired in infidelities, betrayals, and other controversies. As much as I wanted to learn the truth about their heritage, I had as much fun learning about each family member as a personality, whether they’re an old Hollywood starlet or a spirited televangelist.
The game throws plenty of fun curveballs acting as small puzzles in themselves, such as finding the true first name of someone largely known by a nickname, discovering the identities of older relatives with minimal online footprints, or learning the maiden name of a woman who’s endured multiple divorces. Occupations can be similarly obscured since you need a Roottree’s most recent job. Finding answers is a tricky but rewarding exercise of uncovering obscure online resources and using context clues to deduce major discoveries. The writing shines here, as solutions are cleverly hidden in plain sight, and seemingly unrelated materials or people can fit together like perfect puzzle pieces. Even when I failed to make a connection, learning the answer never made me feel disgruntled because it was too opaque; the truth was always right in front of me. I just failed to look at things a certain way.
Doing enough thoughtful digging can excavate an exact answer outright; however, you often have just enough information to approach the finish line and must connect the dots to take an educated leap of faith. It never feels like I’m blindly guessing when I do this, as I usually have plenty of ammunition to back up my suspicions. That the game requires you to fill a batch of identities at a time before it “locks” them – confirming the correct entries and thus eliminating them from the pool – means I need to be pretty confident about my theories, further encouraging thorough investigation.
Initially mundane or irrelevant evidence may become a goldmine of vital clues when reexamined with fresh perspectives. Every breakthrough continually feels like a triumph in that sense, and I love how the game regularly makes old evidence feel exciting again. With so much information to juggle, the in-game notepad is an invaluable tool. It allows players to jot down clues, copy and paste entire text passages from articles, create link shortcuts to previous search results for easy access, and other quality-of-life features. And when you think you have all the answers, the game changes the question with an even tougher second campaign that builds upon your initial investigation and is a great final exam of your newly developed deductive skills.
Getting stuck is inevitable, but the large family tree makes it easy to pause work on one challenging thread to tackle several others (provided you can keep your information straight, but that’s on you). I also appreciate how the game encourages players to keep looking while preventing them from going down the wrong trains of thought for long. Each piece of evidence is accompanied by a number denoting the amount of relevant clues it contains, and this number fluctuates based on your discoveries. This keeps me from needlessly analyzing materials I’ve siphoned all usefulness from while keeping me encouraged when I hit a wall. I may not know what a World War 2 diary I’ve reviewed countless times has left to offer, but seeing it has one clue remaining ensures there’s still meat left on that bone. And if you’re truly stumped, a well-implemented hint system gradually nudges you in the right direction without giving too much away immediately.
Additionally, many irrelevant search results flat-out tell players the information isn’t helpful and to move on, sometimes in humorous ways. The Roottrees Are Dead has plenty of false dead ends, but the real ones are clearly communicated. Still, going down unrelated rabbit holes can lead to funny, sometimes fourth-wall-breaking search results. I won’t spoil them, but I always searched terms I knew had no connection to the case just to see how the game would respond.
The best thing a puzzle game can do is make you feel smart; The Roottrees Are Dead made me feel like the second coming of Sherlock Holmes. Its exceptional mystery is bolstered by stimulating puzzle-solving, a satisfying ending, and a cozy nostalgia that makes it weirdly relaxing to mull over a cup of coffee. Don’t let this quirky search for answers pass you by.
