The Roottrees are Dead

 I've never played anything like this before. I have no words to truly describe how cool this game is. Like, I cannot stress this enough: this game is a masterpiece, and the soundtrack is crazy catchy too. You should all consider supporting jjohnstongames and all the wonderful people and artists who got together to make such a beautiful game.

I played and finished the game months ago and i enjoyed it very much. the story is riveting and the ending was a huge surprise the first time around. I played a few more times and got super into the individual stories of each family member that i honestly wish there was more information that i could read about them. The Roottree lore is so rich and complex. I want more of it and I want to read it all like a book.

 jjohnstongames did an amazing job with this one, there's so much detail and thought that went into each character (and there are so many of them so making a storyline as complex as this one is incredible and must have been no mean feat). They were also kind enough to walk me through installing the desktop version from the official discord so thank you!

Sidenote: I played this game quite a lot through the holidays and it got me through the tough parts of the season and through my college finals. It became a comfort game for me, I would actually have this on a second monitor while I studied and wrote essays and would reward myself with an hour of gameplay to take a break from doing school.

After allowing my thoughts time to settle, I honestly believe this game is excellent and I will be sharing the Steam page with friends, encouraging them to add this to their wishlists. Towards the end of the game some of my answers become lucky guesses, but I feel as though the whole thing can be done without any guesses and I'm curious to dive back in, or engage with the discord, to figure out what evidence I missed.

This is a phenomenal experience. I can't even begin to understand how one writes a story so engaging and convoluted and doesn't lose their mind lolol
And still it felt really realistic and comprehensible. You really feel like a detective in a noir film, doing your research and writing down your notes!!

Overall it's super immersive and it sucks you in immediately. A few times i got really frustrated lolol, when the info got more overwhelming. And the way i confused a bunch of faces because the AI decided to generate them to look the same ahah😭

Spend an entire day playing this in absolute awe. And the ending felt so rewarding! I managed to solve the locked names and felt i was uncovering the story myself ahah!! Loved the story entirely and loved the twist.

Wanna also mention that the sound design, the original theme and the soundtrack of Kevin MacLeod tunes where all absolutely great as well.

I'm definitely looking forward to the Steam version, especially with all the beautiful art shown in the trailer :)

What a game! Very cool. I had a blast playing it. The only thing is the ai generated portraits. Some of them are really deformed, like the portrait of November. 

THIS GAME IS AMAZING! I'm a librarian with an archival background, and this is exactly why I love my field - the mystery, the scrubbing of documents for information, the piecing it all together. The game is very polished and robust too, which I was very surprised at for a free game. I'm not finished yet, but I'm excited to finish! Kudos to you, sir, I would have happily paid for this game.

welp,  i got halfway through the game and my progress got deleted, though thats on me for relying on the web version's save system lol. Still, 10/10 game, going to play it from the beginning now

I WAS PLAYING UNTIL 6:00 AM AND I WOKE UP AT 13:00 PM 11/10

Thoroughly enjoyed this, thank you

Y'all we need a digital walkthrough for this gameeeee!! I can only use context clues so much lol this family tree is so big and convoluted but that's on me haha anyways the game is pretty fun so far! I'd still recommend it as a 10/10 

played the game all in one sitting, stayed up until 2:30am. playing it. what a special game! 

obviously all of the “Aha!” moments are well done, and the connectivity of the different web searches, magazines, etc. is a big feat. the eclectic cast of characters are well thought out. 

but this game also has good juice - things like the click clack on the keyboard, the music cues lining up with the reveals of the correct answers, it improved the experience a lot. 

I also appreciated the concept of the notable relatives - when starting out, it helped to have a more constrained list of people to match, and set the foundation for the rest of my investigation.

by the end, I was able to do a tiny bit of brute force solving, although the increase to “4x answers needed” probably mitigated this somewhat. but I’m overall I was satisfied with the balance between being stumped about next steps and knowing what to search for next. 
 
looking forward to the fully-featured release on Steam (particularly the new art)!

Absolutely amazing game. Tbh, there are plenty of times where I get so stuck I really wanted to quit, due to the lack of walkthrough. However, the mystery is so intriguing that I decided to keep pushing. The end is so worth it!

Bug: (Sorry if this was already posted but I didn't find it with a google search.) The game is running very HOT. On my gaming laptop, the fan sounds like a hair dryer; and on my cheap laptop, the system is literally overheating to the point of Windows shutting down. Aside from that, GREAT JOB -- I love this game! Buying you coffee as soon as I solve it. :)

I LOVED this. It was so engaging and challenging. I'll play it again when my memory runs out, for sure!

Just finished playing this today, absolutely LOVED it. Very challenging, and kept me engaged the whole way through! 

This game is so fun and well-made. Obra Dinn meets Her Story really is a great way of describing it and I've been sending it to all my friends who like either (or puzzle games in general.) I'm currently stuck on a few of the youngest Roottrees and wives (if I can't figure them out by tomorrow I may hop on the discord) and I've definitely brute-forced a few (for instance, I found the clues to November's occupation after I had already locked her in by going "that book mentioned a career among that generation that I haven't used yet") but honestly that just makes me want to know just how many clues I've missed! Any game that's good enough to monopolize my attention when I'm so deep in the thralls of BG3 obsession has to be special, and I actively chose to play this instead because it's just so fantastic.  Thanks for making something so great and for sharing it with us!

I went by vibes only for the final spouses' names and it worked. maybe I've become a Roottree.

i just finished it ! thought i was gunna give up but just took a break and came back. those intuition points got me through it and I noticed at the end I missed 2 pieces of evidence but still figured everything out. loved it !! thank you !~

So much fun!!! ill have to replay once i forget the answers

This game took me a while but LORD it was so good! Certain things are really tough to find, but I loved it, I felt so accomplished at the end, perfect ending first try! 10/10 fr

Loved the whole game but there is a transformation as you go from searching history about these grand individuals who have long since died to digging about for the niche careers or random webpages of some of the less well-known in the family. It felt realistic and kind of personal as not everyone in the family is going to be a superstar with articles written about them. Fantastic way to spend the afternoon.

Very good game! I'm glad that The Thing That Return of The Obra Dinn Does is becoming its own genre. I don't think this quite recaptures the magic it does in narrative pacing or logical tightness but it doesn't really need to. IMO one of less good things about this compared to it is that it doesn't have an indicator that you have all the info needed to solve the mystery — when the rain started falling in Obra Dinn and I hadn't even completed a fourth of the book, my mind was blown by the fact every shipman's identity was possible to deduce by then. Having a full computer's worth of info to dredge up gave TRaD an authentic detective feel, but it also made it less engaging as a logic puzzle IMO, even with the anti-frustration mechanics. Maybe I had enough information to solve any given identity, but maybe I forgot to plug one specific keyword into one of seven databases. When I was down to the final 8-ish my logic felt sort of dubious for this reason, and I'm still not sure how you're supposed to differentiate the portraits/names I guessed to solve.

The use of AI art is really tasteful here (good luck hiring all the models you'd need to make every piece of evidence coherent) but I'll reiterate that you really should consider re-releasing this with commissioned art. I can't even count how many times I second-guessed myself trying to identify the same person across multiple photos because AI generated images don't have the same level of intent as human art. I'm still not entirely convinced the puzzle is fair, in this respect

Played this over discord with some pals commentating, we got stuck near the end and had to guess the last career, plus we also jumped to the conclusion that there was a murder somewhere in the story. Overall, a good time, we had a lot of fun with it!

I walked into this game thinking it was going to be a quick game but finally finishing it a day later proved me wrong. The level of depth in this game is incredible. I can't even imagine how much work went into making it. Truly an amazing game.

This was really fun! A very well done mystery game and we particularly enjoyed searching for clues and being rewarded by finding another clues lol! The whole thing with showing how many pieces of evidence are left to be discovered was also quite helpful. 

Just got done playing this with some friends and discord and it was an absolute blast. I'm particularly impressed by how filling out the family tree felt like just the right difficulty - we never got stuck in a way that was frustrating, it was always just compelling. It helped that most of the non-optional information could be found from a variety of sources, or logically intuited/figured out by process of elimination after certain points. I imagine writing something like this has got to be a real balancing act and takes a huge amount of skill to pull off. The actual white-box typed in answers at the end were perhaps a bit too easy to come to, but that really felt secondary to the journey getting there.

I enjoyed this more than I tend to enjoy a lot of typical mystery game structures which tend to have a whodunnit or a howdunnit element to them, because I feel like I can get bogged down in the more open-ended nature of that kind of question. The fact that exactly what we were looking for in this game was so concrete - names, photos, and jobs - stopped me from getting lost in the weeds of wondering if I was basing my entire gameplay off of incorrect assumptions and made the actual search just a blast to do.

There's a ton of really funny, quirky, or otherwise interesting stuff to be found in here even outside of the enticing yarn of the Roottree family. The AI generated photos really help sell the epistolary format. Everything going on here just works! Great stuff.

Awesome game! I loved it—a super fun and fair puzzle/mystery game. I wish the ending mystery was a little less spelled-out (onfvpnyyl nyy bs gur pyhrf pnzr sebz n fvatyr fbhepr (Ynhen'f wbheany) naq gurer ernyyl jnfa'g zhpu gb "svther bhg", pbzcnerq gb gur bgure snzvyl zrzoref), but I had so much fun filling in the whole tree that I'm willing to overlook it haha