The year is 1998 and a private jet belonging to the Roottree Corporation has crashed. On it were The Roottree Sisters and their parents. Armed only with the power of your mighty dial-up modem, you'll scour for photos, books, articles, and other evidence to solve the family tree puzzle: The Roottrees are Dead by Jeremy Johnston.
Hi! I'm Bart Bonte, a Belgian independent game designer and bontegames.com is where I blog about new interesting browser and mobile games. My own games are all in the left column (or at the bottom of this page on mobile). More info about me and my games on bartbonte.com.
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December 04, 2023
the roottrees are dead [browser]
The year is 1998 and a private jet belonging to the Roottree Corporation has crashed. On it were The Roottree Sisters and their parents. Armed only with the power of your mighty dial-up modem, you'll scour for photos, books, articles, and other evidence to solve the family tree puzzle: The Roottrees are Dead by Jeremy Johnston.
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22 comments:
I think you need to quit your job to play this.
This is a lot of fun, and a very impressive game, but yeah it is literally a job.
It says that the periodicals automatically appear in your notes but I can't find them oops. Very interesting so far though!
Oh my god this has no business being so good. The little details, the creepy photos... Played for a couple hours and still haven't finished it. Definitely gonna follow the creator.
Tat, the "Periodicals" tab in your notes is second from the top. It only records the name of the magazine or paper, and to actually read the content of articles you'll have to use the in-game computer's Periodical search function (the post-it on the right side of the CRT.)
Wow, that was involving. This reminded me a lot of "Return of the Obra Dinn" with how you're piecing together identities from limited information, right down to a confirmation mechanic that allows you to push some guesses through if you can't quite put all the breadcrumbs together. I didn't make every single connection, even though I did have all the identities 100% by the end of the game. Thankfully the ending cutscene inadvertently showed me the links I'd missed.
I got frustrated on page 1 as the name I needed was not in the drop down menu.
Blanche, you need to use the legal birth name of each person. All the names you need are there.
@Blanche, that person uses their middle name (e.g. goes by "Jane", but legal name is "Sarah Jane", so the name on the list is "Sarah Doe" not "Jane Doe"). But it was incredibly hard to find that out using the in-game search engine; the only way I could get that info was if I searched "Sarah Doe" and then it was like, "Sarah is the legal birth name of Jane". Searching "Jane Doe real name" didn't bring up anything which was very frustrating. Made it a lot harder than it needed to be, in my opinion.
Yeah, the in-game "search engine" is really more of an adventure-game style text parser, in that there are certain words or phrases that will return a hit, but stepping outside those boundaries will get you nowhere. Spelling a name wrong or leaving out punctuation in a book title will also be unsuccessful. I suspect setting the game in 1998 was intentionally done so that the player can search for information through a familiar type of interface, but without the author needing to code something as user-friendly as even early Google was.
On the first page the game directs you to pull up, there is a searchable term in the text that will give you another article that provides the first missing name.
wonderful. quite wonderful. nice story, a really balanced level of difficulty and sooo much effort in the clues, texts, sources, music pieces etc. etc. ... and the somewhat 'historical accuracy' regarding the story, the photos, names, ...
Stole a lot of my time, but I instantly wish for more of this.
Any advice on how to progress when you're stuck? I've got 37 of 49 and have hit a bit of a dead end. This is so fun though
@Tat You can browse the discord spoiler chat, a good lot of hints you can find there.
It's linked in the game's settings.
I love this so much!! Thank you everyone for tips, LOL I figured it out on my own about 2 minutes after I posted, and now I'm embarrassed I even posted my frustration.
This game reminds me a lot of the Return of the Obra Dinn, perhaps my favorite game ever, and I've been pining for something that matched it in complexity and storyline. I appreciate how offhand comments in descriptions/interviews can unlock huge amounts of information.
This took me 9 hours to complete and I didn't find all the evidence but it was a lot of fun.
Blanche, if you liked Obra Dinn definitely check out 'The Curse of the Golden Idol', which ought to scratch the same itch :)
oooh TY Frobisher! Adding to my Steam queue now!
Loved this game!
sooo freaking good. the bit with the locked box said it may require some leaps in logic - but it felt completely logical and perfectly foreshadowed to me
Wow, it is such a great game! Took a few days to finish it, near the end I even have to check discord for hints, but I really enjoyed the investigation! :)
After returning a few TIMES I reread the PAPER & do a head smack.
The first periodical was there all along.
i got stuck on the second boss level in a glitch and ended up inside the giant brown box lmao
ngl this game took me a solid month and a half to finish. everyday after coming home from work i'd spend hours solving this tree, enjoying every single song that played. never thought i'd finish the game until around 1.30am, when the final cutscene played. as of the writing of this comment, im tired, but wholly satisfied with this wonderful experience of a game
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