A rather fun little experience, although I somehow ended up missing one of the magazines and an interview that would've made some things a lot easier on me!
I did figure out the secret and I also found the thing (took until my second reading of the entry to realize why nothing in there was cropping up in the in-game search engine!)
Sure, sorry that was unclear. The main menu of the game has a link that takes you straight to the game's discord. You can also find it in the settings menu.
During the beginning of the game, when you do a search directly for Rhose Roottree there is a hint that will put you on the right path to finding her name.
This is amazing!! I love deduction games, especially where you have to look up different sources to find answers, and this knocked it out of the park!! 5 stars!! I could tell who the people in the secret locked area were, I just had to find out the last one's name! And it felt amazing when I found it out!! This was so satisfying to complete and I loved every second of it!! :D The only difficulty I would say is figuring out the pictures at some parts, but even then, it's still very satisfying when you get them correct! Love this game!!
Loved this. Wish the save system worked better or was more clear (I saved then closed the tab, then came back to the URL and i couldn't load anything, it started from the start, but anyway)
The story gripped me, I went into full Charlie Kelly mode, linking threads between seemingly unrelated ideas, going "AHA!" when i was right.
If you come to the discord I won't be able to help you get your notes back, but I can get you an executable version of the game if it would prevent that from happening again if you'd like.
You can use CTRL+Z to undo your last action; I've deleted my notes an embarrassing number of times, but it's recoverable as long as you don't start typing again after
I haven't completed this yet, maybe 30% through? But this is such a cool game. Everything is so well thought out and it's a great challenge. I'm losing my marbles
Skillful fusion between Lucas Pope and Sam Barlow, combined with the theme of genealogy: this game was made for me. I have finally found my Game of the Year for 2023. I made a $20 donation as a token of gratitude for all the happiness you gave me with your game!
PS: Another good point, the game is fully playable for a french player with moderate english knowledge.
I just reloaded the tab and lost all my progress. I don't really feel like playing the entire game again, so I guess I'll just have to wait until someone uploads a complete playthrough.
Before that happened, I was thoroughly stumped on the last 4 portraits. I had checked literally every possible lead, and nothing. I feel like the only way to find them is through brute-forcing. Either that or I missed 1 incredibly missable word in one of the articles.
This was INCREDIBLY FUN! Thank you so much for the hours of free entertainment this gave me, I loved every single discovery I made and never used walkthroughs, which is rare for me!
I can't imagine the amount of work that must've gone into making this game. The mechanic of filling out spots on the family tree gives a good goal for the player, which I've found lacking in other research/conspiracy games previously. The intuition chart was also a great help for the back half of the game once you stop getting as much new info. A great way to end out the year!
I had so much fun, thank you for this! This has been a ray of light in these very trying times. Now I kind of wish to know more about the so-called Roottree curse :0
Great stuff loved this. Just a bit annoyed since I got all the way to the end and forgot to put down 1 picture so I had to go back to the title but that's my fault. Just some other nitpicks...
Wish I could have heard those other music pieces in rotation or option to just loop a certain choice
The text on the search engines would bug sometimes if I swapped between them too fast and become illegible gibberish but swapping back fixes it.
Zooming in and out of the tree would sometimes not work unless you used your mouse to drag a smidge on the tree first.
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, ...
In terms of feeling-like-a-real-detective I might have gotten rid of the intuition chart, but I have to admit that it helped me a lot in the end.
Stole a lot of my time, but I instantly wish for more of this.
This game was soooo great! The clues are set up well enough that even when you're stuck, it doesn't feel unfair, just like you have to look over all of the information again. The sheer amount of effort and planning everything must have taken is pretty incredible.
a person recommended me this game and I proceeded to spend any free time I had playing this for the next few days, if this game was on steam I would gladly pay for it!
Really enjoying it so far, definitely my style of game. My BFF recommended me to play it. Never played a in-browser game in itch.io before. I'm at 45/49 and a day in. I'm so stuck to find 2 last photos. Literally 2. I've gone through everything twice but maybe I'm missing something. I recommend using copy/paste. For a while there, I kept getting no results because I spelled theatRE as theaTER. That was embarrassing. Hopefully, I can figure it out. I have had great time playing thus far.
This is an incredible game! I found it when searching for games like The Case of the Golden Idol and Return of the Obra Dinn and was not disappointed. I hope I find more games that "scratch this itch"
Really excellent game!! I feel like the flow between states of knowing exactly where to look, having no idea, and suddenly having ideas to check back in different places was really well balanced. The intuition meter especially was great for knowing when we could just ignore stuff. And having to get the pictures just for the blood relatives meant it had a good balance of leaps of logic / guesswork - figuring out a spouse's name by trial and error could then help you search the right stuff for their kids, but you couldn't just guess the blood relatives. I really loved it!
I appreciate it! If you know anyone else who likes mysteries, please pass it along!
All of the spouses do have a way to find them without needing to resort to guess work, though they're the most "out of the box" puzzles in the game, to be fair.
If you have any question about how you were supposed to come across someone or any questions about the game at all, the discord can help.
I've finally done it! I got the tree to 100%, first try! It only took me... Multiple weeks.
I think this is the perfect level of difficulty for a puzzle game; Whenever I got completely stuck, there was another path to go down that ended up either knocking some branch out that was blocking my path, or giving my brain enough of a break to look at other puzzles with fresh eyes. The last few non-blood names were satisfyingly intuitive to all place down at once!
I also LOVE the notebook mechanic, though my one request would be to have either more tabs or scrolling/separate pages under one tab. I ended up having just enough tabs to finish, but some of my writing ended up eye-achingly small due to lack of space.
No need to donate (I mean it), this game is free on purpose due to its usage of AI art.
(If you are really insistent on donating however, there is a support link that itchio puts below the game window.)
As for the alternate picture, I'd prefer you edit your post if possible to remove their names. One of the people you mentioned, you can think of as a "notable" Roottree, except they were notable before the internet existed. So maybe they could be mentioned somewhere less digital.
Oh, derp. I completely missed the support button. I don't use itch.io much.
Thanks for the hint, I got it now. I had found the relevant article before, but didn't think to then search for the thing that actually gives the picture, oops.
I donated a bit anyway because this clever game deserves it. I don't know if you're interested in continuing in this direction, but I'd totally play a series of similar "research puzzle" games!
I do appreciate your donation, thank you. As for continuing in the future right now there are no solid plans. This wasn't supposed to even be the scope that it turned out and I do have a full time job to contend with, so I don't have any immediate plans. I do have some puzzle-game-adjacent stuff I've thought about but its a long ways away from becoming a reality.
While I have yet to play "Her Story", I have beat "The Obra Dinn" and this game features puzzles that are enjoyable in the same way the puzzles in that game are, piecing together the puzzle pieces while only being given usually incomplete information so that when you finally figure it out, it feels all the more rewarding. I am not sure how the story stands on its own right, but paired with the mechanics of the game its very enjoyable and intriguing.
It also gives me a feel of how families grow so big so fast and how while some members of the family live completely ordinary or below-average lives, some are prominent figures of society. Despite being of the same family, the people are so much different. I personally didn't notice or mind the fact that the images were AI-generated and they, for the most part, suit the game for their purpose. I would recommend you to check this game out if you are interested!
Looks cool, but I think I'm missing the bottom portion of the page and can't scroll down. Could you consider either running the game in full screen or possibly adding scrollbars to the frame in the Edit Game interface?
There should be a full screen button on the bottom right section of the game window itself when it is running that allows you to maximize the game to match your screen size.
Fantastically well put-together investigation sim, thoroughly enjoyable - and I do so respect when a project wears its inspirations on its sleeve.
I'd also like to mention that, in my opinion, the AI-generated images were mighty well used here (I would say 'best implementation I've seen so far', but that's admittedly a low bar). Sure, you can tell most of them are AI, but I never found it particularly distracting - if anything, I was impressed by such consistently adept usage of low-budget tools. For a game I can imagine may well have been put together on the cost of a single jar of peanut butter, it certainly feels like more than the sum of its parts. Bravo!
The game is fun, but whenever I save and quit to play it another time, it just doesn't save, so all the progress is lost... Also, the opening cutscene is laggy, but that might just be my potato laptop.
If you're able to come to the discord I can help you get an exe that will allow you to save permanently. The link to the discord is on the main menu or in the settings.
this is an extremely good game that I would have no qualms rating 10/10 if not for one thing that really drags it down-- the "artwork." for a game with such care and attention to detail in the mechanics and writing, the sludgy AI generated artwork really does not match the standard of quality. While I understand why it was done with the scale and scope of this project already, skimping on the visual element is probably one of the worst places you could, since a.) we have to stare at these pictures all the time and b.) visual identification is a large part of the game. I don't think I'd be alone in saying that the parts where you have to identify people from images were made artificially much harder because the additional images either straight up had virtually no resemblance to the original people, or because the important details (ESPECIALLY eyes, or clothes) were impossible to distinguish. If these sections were made with original artwork or even photobashing of real people, there would be much more opportunity for intentionality and clarity with the visuals that this otherwise incredible game unfortunately severely lacks. While getting artwork can be hard, there are a lot of similar indie puzzle games with more "unpolished" or even "amateur" art that succeed immensely at what they're trying to do, because the art fits that purpose. If the photorealistic style is absolutely integral, there are also easy ways to make realistic 3D models of people (like Metahuman) that would let you create realistic images and have a much more increased level of control over any and all connected/future graphics. There's clearly already enough photobashing present in this game that makes me think a tighter graphical direction could really elevate the experience. If this was a 15, 30, or even 2 hour game it might be perfectly serviceable, but for a potentially 10 hour experience, having visuals that feel like placeholders really cheapens the whole thing, which is sad because otherwise this game was extremely good. I'd love to see some sort of remaster of this in the future with actual human made graphics, but otherwise, I had a really great time! I'm very interested to see more!
10/10 !! I got so invested into the game and its world I could not tear myself away for the ~7 hours it took me to completely fill out the tree (including the locked section :D). If only I could wipe my memory to be able to experience this game and solve the mystery all over again.
I honestly created an account just to say that this is probably the best game I've played on this website! It's so cool and satisfying when you finally figure out the part you've been missing and I felt like a problem solving god when I solved the locked part. I hope you make more cool games!
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loved it ! spent 5 hours holed up playing from start to finish lol
A rather fun little experience, although I somehow ended up missing one of the magazines and an interview that would've made some things a lot easier on me!
I did figure out the secret and I also found the thing (took until my second reading of the entry to realize why nothing in there was cropping up in the in-game search engine!)
Is there a way to download this and play it offline? Or at least a way to save it to a file? I just lost all my progress because the save didn't work.
People on the discord can get you an executable version of the game.
May I ask what the Discord channel/link is? I'd also like to download it, but I don't know which Discord to go to.
Sure, sorry that was unclear. The main menu of the game has a link that takes you straight to the game's discord. You can also find it in the settings menu.
where the heck is rhose roottree's name
I couldnt find it either.
During the beginning of the game, when you do a search directly for Rhose Roottree there is a hint that will put you on the right path to finding her name.
help where TT
It says to find more information about people search for the brands and products surrounding them. That's the hint that can help you find her.
Hint: Rhose is not her birth name, look up the companies that she involve in. Hope that help<33
i cant see what companies iufgyvefeir
This is amazing!! I love deduction games, especially where you have to look up different sources to find answers, and this knocked it out of the park!! 5 stars!! I could tell who the people in the secret locked area were, I just had to find out the last one's name! And it felt amazing when I found it out!! This was so satisfying to complete and I loved every second of it!! :D The only difficulty I would say is figuring out the pictures at some parts, but even then, it's still very satisfying when you get them correct! Love this game!!
great game, but the pictures are so hard to associate with people. i had to brute force caroline morden becuase i had no idea how she looked like
This was an unbelievably amazing experience and I am blown away.
I also undid the secret partially by accident. I thought that (whisper whisper) instead of (whisper whisper), but the game counted it as a win.
Loved this. Wish the save system worked better or was more clear (I saved then closed the tab, then came back to the URL and i couldn't load anything, it started from the start, but anyway)
The story gripped me, I went into full Charlie Kelly mode, linking threads between seemingly unrelated ideas, going "AHA!" when i was right.
Good game. Very good game. Thank you, Johnstons.
sheeeit i was totally into this but then i accidentally deleted my notes and now i'm deflated
If you come to the discord I won't be able to help you get your notes back, but I can get you an executable version of the game if it would prevent that from happening again if you'd like.
You can use CTRL+Z to undo your last action; I've deleted my notes an embarrassing number of times, but it's recoverable as long as you don't start typing again after
I haven't completed this yet, maybe 30% through? But this is such a cool game. Everything is so well thought out and it's a great challenge. I'm losing my marbles
Skillful fusion between Lucas Pope and Sam Barlow, combined with the theme of genealogy: this game was made for me. I have finally found my Game of the Year for 2023. I made a $20 donation as a token of gratitude for all the happiness you gave me with your game!
PS: Another good point, the game is fully playable for a french player with moderate english knowledge.
Such a great game. If I wasn't a broke student I'd 100% give you money for it because I had so much darn fun !!!
I just reloaded the tab and lost all my progress. I don't really feel like playing the entire game again, so I guess I'll just have to wait until someone uploads a complete playthrough.
Before that happened, I was thoroughly stumped on the last 4 portraits. I had checked literally every possible lead, and nothing. I feel like the only way to find them is through brute-forcing. Either that or I missed 1 incredibly missable word in one of the articles.
That being said, it was a solid game. 7/10.
If you'd like to come to the discord I can try to catch you back up to where you were before, and also help you with the last four. Up to you.
Not even close to being finished with this yet, but I've sent a fiver your way anyway. This is wonderful.
This was INCREDIBLY FUN! Thank you so much for the hours of free entertainment this gave me, I loved every single discovery I made and never used walkthroughs, which is rare for me!
I can't imagine the amount of work that must've gone into making this game. The mechanic of filling out spots on the family tree gives a good goal for the player, which I've found lacking in other research/conspiracy games previously. The intuition chart was also a great help for the back half of the game once you stop getting as much new info. A great way to end out the year!
I had so much fun, thank you for this! This has been a ray of light in these very trying times. Now I kind of wish to know more about the so-called Roottree curse :0
The Roottree curse theory says that Roottrees who run the candy company are cursed to die. it's fucking stupid.
One of the best games of 2023. What a ride!
Great stuff loved this. Just a bit annoyed since I got all the way to the end and forgot to put down 1 picture so I had to go back to the title but that's my fault. Just some other nitpicks...
Wish I could have heard those other music pieces in rotation or option to just loop a certain choice
The text on the search engines would bug sometimes if I swapped between them too fast and become illegible gibberish but swapping back fixes it.
Zooming in and out of the tree would sometimes not work unless you used your mouse to drag a smidge on the tree first.
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, ...
In terms of feeling-like-a-real-detective I might have gotten rid of the intuition chart, but I have to admit that it helped me a lot in the end.
Stole a lot of my time, but I instantly wish for more of this.
This game was soooo great! The clues are set up well enough that even when you're stuck, it doesn't feel unfair, just like you have to look over all of the information again. The sheer amount of effort and planning everything must have taken is pretty incredible.
I'm glad all my iteration on the story paid off! The story evolved a lot, and each time it did a few more connections began to take shape.
Thanks for playing!
a person recommended me this game and I proceeded to spend any free time I had playing this for the next few days, if this game was on steam I would gladly pay for it!
Thank you!
Really enjoying it so far, definitely my style of game. My BFF recommended me to play it. Never played a in-browser game in itch.io before. I'm at 45/49 and a day in. I'm so stuck to find 2 last photos. Literally 2. I've gone through everything twice but maybe I'm missing something. I recommend using copy/paste. For a while there, I kept getting no results because I spelled theatRE as theaTER. That was embarrassing. Hopefully, I can figure it out. I have had great time playing thus far.
I hope you managed to find the final 2! If you need any hints feel free to drop by the discord.
This is an incredible game! I found it when searching for games like The Case of the Golden Idol and Return of the Obra Dinn and was not disappointed. I hope I find more games that "scratch this itch"
Glad it helped you in that regard. Thanks for playing!
Really excellent game!! I feel like the flow between states of knowing exactly where to look, having no idea, and suddenly having ideas to check back in different places was really well balanced. The intuition meter especially was great for knowing when we could just ignore stuff. And having to get the pictures just for the blood relatives meant it had a good balance of leaps of logic / guesswork - figuring out a spouse's name by trial and error could then help you search the right stuff for their kids, but you couldn't just guess the blood relatives. I really loved it!
I appreciate it! If you know anyone else who likes mysteries, please pass it along!
All of the spouses do have a way to find them without needing to resort to guess work, though they're the most "out of the box" puzzles in the game, to be fair.
If you have any question about how you were supposed to come across someone or any questions about the game at all, the discord can help.
I've finally done it! I got the tree to 100%, first try! It only took me... Multiple weeks.
I think this is the perfect level of difficulty for a puzzle game; Whenever I got completely stuck, there was another path to go down that ended up either knocking some branch out that was blocking my path, or giving my brain enough of a break to look at other puzzles with fresh eyes. The last few non-blood names were satisfyingly intuitive to all place down at once!
I also LOVE the notebook mechanic, though my one request would be to have either more tabs or scrolling/separate pages under one tab. I ended up having just enough tabs to finish, but some of my writing ended up eye-achingly small due to lack of space.
Would love to see a sequel / sister game!
Speaking of the notebook, I'm curious what other people labeled their tabs. I ended up much more organized than I usually do, lol
My personal tabs were:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7
Page 8
ah yes of course
ah yes of course
This is sooo good, please make 100 more of them!!!
I would like to know.
Awesome game, great work. Any way to donate to support you?
Also, I almost got 100% but... any hint for the alternate pictures of [redacted]?
No need to donate (I mean it), this game is free on purpose due to its usage of AI art.
(If you are really insistent on donating however, there is a support link that itchio puts below the game window.)
As for the alternate picture, I'd prefer you edit your post if possible to remove their names. One of the people you mentioned, you can think of as a "notable" Roottree, except they were notable before the internet existed. So maybe they could be mentioned somewhere less digital.
Oh, derp. I completely missed the support button. I don't use itch.io much.
Thanks for the hint, I got it now. I had found the relevant article before, but didn't think to then search for the thing that actually gives the picture, oops.
I donated a bit anyway because this clever game deserves it. I don't know if you're interested in continuing in this direction, but I'd totally play a series of similar "research puzzle" games!
I do appreciate your donation, thank you. As for continuing in the future right now there are no solid plans. This wasn't supposed to even be the scope that it turned out and I do have a full time job to contend with, so I don't have any immediate plans. I do have some puzzle-game-adjacent stuff I've thought about but its a long ways away from becoming a reality.
i did it :D after mannyyy hours. Top tier game its very good. theres nothing else i need to say
While I have yet to play "Her Story", I have beat "The Obra Dinn" and this game features puzzles that are enjoyable in the same way the puzzles in that game are, piecing together the puzzle pieces while only being given usually incomplete information so that when you finally figure it out, it feels all the more rewarding. I am not sure how the story stands on its own right, but paired with the mechanics of the game its very enjoyable and intriguing.
It also gives me a feel of how families grow so big so fast and how while some members of the family live completely ordinary or below-average lives, some are prominent figures of society. Despite being of the same family, the people are so much different.
I personally didn't notice or mind the fact that the images were AI-generated and they, for the most part, suit the game for their purpose. I would recommend you to check this game out if you are interested!
Looks cool, but I think I'm missing the bottom portion of the page and can't scroll down. Could you consider either running the game in full screen or possibly adding scrollbars to the frame in the Edit Game interface?
There should be a full screen button on the bottom right section of the game window itself when it is running that allows you to maximize the game to match your screen size.
Fantastically well put-together investigation sim, thoroughly enjoyable - and I do so respect when a project wears its inspirations on its sleeve.
I'd also like to mention that, in my opinion, the AI-generated images were mighty well used here (I would say 'best implementation I've seen so far', but that's admittedly a low bar). Sure, you can tell most of them are AI, but I never found it particularly distracting - if anything, I was impressed by such consistently adept usage of low-budget tools. For a game I can imagine may well have been put together on the cost of a single jar of peanut butter, it certainly feels like more than the sum of its parts. Bravo!
The game is fun, but whenever I save and quit to play it another time, it just doesn't save, so all the progress is lost... Also, the opening cutscene is laggy, but that might just be my potato laptop.
If you're able to come to the discord I can help you get an exe that will allow you to save permanently. The link to the discord is on the main menu or in the settings.
this is an extremely good game that I would have no qualms rating 10/10 if not for one thing that really drags it down--
the "artwork."
for a game with such care and attention to detail in the mechanics and writing, the sludgy AI generated artwork really does not match the standard of quality. While I understand why it was done with the scale and scope of this project already, skimping on the visual element is probably one of the worst places you could, since a.) we have to stare at these pictures all the time and b.) visual identification is a large part of the game. I don't think I'd be alone in saying that the parts where you have to identify people from images were made artificially much harder because the additional images either straight up had virtually no resemblance to the original people, or because the important details (ESPECIALLY eyes, or clothes) were impossible to distinguish. If these sections were made with original artwork or even photobashing of real people, there would be much more opportunity for intentionality and clarity with the visuals that this otherwise incredible game unfortunately severely lacks.
While getting artwork can be hard, there are a lot of similar indie puzzle games with more "unpolished" or even "amateur" art that succeed immensely at what they're trying to do, because the art fits that purpose. If the photorealistic style is absolutely integral, there are also easy ways to make realistic 3D models of people (like Metahuman) that would let you create realistic images and have a much more increased level of control over any and all connected/future graphics. There's clearly already enough photobashing present in this game that makes me think a tighter graphical direction could really elevate the experience. If this was a 15, 30, or even 2 hour game it might be perfectly serviceable, but for a potentially 10 hour experience, having visuals that feel like placeholders really cheapens the whole thing, which is sad because otherwise this game was extremely good.
I'd love to see some sort of remaster of this in the future with actual human made graphics, but otherwise, I had a really great time! I'm very interested to see more!
100%. I understand the economics of it but it really detracts from what was otherwise a fantastic, fantastic game.
If you can find a way to replace the "photos" in a later version, please do.
I actually thought the pictures were fantastic and the resemblance between children/parents and siblings was really great.
This was really great, thanks :)
10/10 !! I got so invested into the game and its world I could not tear myself away for the ~7 hours it took me to completely fill out the tree (including the locked section :D). If only I could wipe my memory to be able to experience this game and solve the mystery all over again.
weird how this game exists within the universe of the game.
I honestly created an account just to say that this is probably the best game I've played on this website! It's so cool and satisfying when you finally figure out the part you've been missing and I felt like a problem solving god when I solved the locked part. I hope you make more cool games!