I've only played for ~45 minutes and it's already clear that some of this game's biggest inspirations are Sam Barlow's FMV works and Lucas Pope's "Return of the Obra Dinn". So far the set-up is promising. I'm hoping for some cool twists and turns within the narrative but I don't want to set my expectations too high. I'm also not a fan of the use of Midjourney's generative AI for this game, but I totally understand how paying for Midjourney is a lot cheaper and easier than hiring actors, especially as an indie dev (for a free game!). Looking forward to playing much more :)))
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. :)
This likely means that your browser isn't allowing the game to save cookies or there is an issue with an adblocker.
If you come to the discord I (or someone else) can set you up with a downloadable version of the game that will save your file locally instead of into your browser data.
I'm not sure. I wouldn't trust it if it didn't work the first time. If you run into any kind of bug near the end of the game due to not being able to save I'd really not want for you to have to start over
The discord is found on the main menu of the game. If you mean that the main menu won't even come up in your current browser, you should be able to temporarily open it in a different browser, and click the discord link there. (Don't bother playing it in a browser that's unfamiliar with you, you can close that browser once you click the discord link)
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!
You're going to need to do a bit more research specifically into the person you're missing.
If you search for her name directly on the search engine, it will give you some general search tips on how to track individual people down. This includes searching for things associated with them like product and brand names.
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 !~
I finished it! My bad for the deleted post, I messed up while trying to add a reply.
I didn't connect a lot of the pieces until the end of the game, but I still ended up missing only 2 entries! The locked picture had me messed up in the earlier game (lol), and I couldn't figure out the surname for the second locked person. I overlooked a lot of clues in hindsight or straight up forgot about them, but the notebook feature was incredibly useful, because I was able to write down key points I'd found out and not have to seek the sources out again (mostly).
If you're planning on playing this, I'd really recommend to do the same! If something seems even a bit important, write it down in your notebook. And even if you've already looked at something, it's very useful to go back multiple times. Pay attention to the intuition points!!
Anyways, I love this game. I'm going to replay it in a year or two, once I've lost all memory of the mystery. To whoever is reading this, have a great day! ^^
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
For this one you're gonna wanna look more into one of the Notable Roottree who is directly connected to Eli C.
Be sure to re-read any resources you found when looking into him the first time, especially the ones that are also listed on the periodicals page of your notepad.
Most mobile games are meant to be played across many short sessions, with good breaks between the gameplay. I think that generally this game has a bit too much reading and note-taking and cross referencing to make it an ideal game for playing in short bursts.
I'm really sorry to hear about your save problems. I'm not sure what more I can do. It's saving to a file that's essentially out of my control. As for my connection to the Pittsburgh region, you can read more about that by searching for the local in-game periodical from that region... but the answer is no. I just picked it at random as a place that sounded reasonable.
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.
does anyone know how to find the extra two pictures of some siblings? I've filled out everything else and finished the game already but its bugging me that those two are the only things left
I prefer, if you could, remove the names of those people. Maybe just say "some siblings".
I can try to be super vague here but give you enough to find it. It's not on a website though you need the computer. Check the older resources related to the job of the more well known one.
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
Hello! I'm really enjoying my time with this game, I did the first three names and closed the game to spend more time later mulling over the puzzles. However, when I clicked the "skip" button during the intro, it directed me to the "Thanks for Playing!" screen. When I clicked the "title" button, it redirected me to the title and I was able to click "skip" normally, but the game proceeded to throw all kinds of strange bugs--acting like I had finished the game when trying to apply a new picture to a profile. Just noting it as a potential bug!
Fantastic game! Me and my wife played it all in one evening. The puzzles were great, and the intuition system was both helpful and infuriating. We would go back to some evidence and wonder how on earth there was more to get from it, then we would eventually find it and be like Hell Yea. We had a great time.
-Spoiler- We ended up never finding the Silver Screen periodical or that other Romance novel, so those were interesting to see in the ending.
Really solid stuff! I thoroughly enjoyed your game after it was recommended to me because I liked Return of the Obra Dinn. There were no unfair mysteries, everything fell into place neatly. Getting to manually enter the final section felt good, especially because I was right! Bravo.
I sometimes get a bit of glitching of text in the game's computer searches. I need to search for something else as refreshing the same search doesn't update.
Additionally, I was having a difficult time trying to find the true name for "Wild Bill" Williams. Neither Periodicals nor Search was able to help. Was I supposed to assume the rumours were true and look for a book written by Marilyn Monroe (or Norma Jeane Mortenson) to see if there was an expose about ol' creepily charming Bill? It's so easy to overthink things.
I'm coming to the realisation that I should write down information into real notebooks. It's easy to take too many notes. I started thinking that the birth years of the people was going to be important.
In time, are you looking to eventually release the game files here on itch for paid download? (Some of us may have issues with Discord's EULA)
I am not planning on releasing a paid version here on itchio. As for the name you were missing, there is a periodical that you likely didn't find. It's mentioned offhand in a pretty major book (the main one in the game) and some people skip right over it because it feels a bit like "lore".
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I WAS PLAYING UNTIL 6:00 AM AND I WOKE UP AT 13:00 PM 11/10
Thoroughly enjoyed this, thank you
I've only played for ~45 minutes and it's already clear that some of this game's biggest inspirations are Sam Barlow's FMV works and Lucas Pope's "Return of the Obra Dinn". So far the set-up is promising. I'm hoping for some cool twists and turns within the narrative but I don't want to set my expectations too high. I'm also not a fan of the use of Midjourney's generative AI for this game, but I totally understand how paying for Midjourney is a lot cheaper and easier than hiring actors, especially as an indie dev (for a free game!). Looking forward to playing much more :)))
+I will definitely be seated for the steam release
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
I spent a whole nearly 6 hours on this stupid game. I had dreams, MULTIPLE DREAMS, about this game. I hate you jjohnstongames.
I need more. 10/10. No notes.
only 6 hours? i've been trying at this game for months lol
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!
I know who the last person is, but I can't find their picture. Do I actually have to fill it in?
Ah, I had just missed it.
Anyway, I enjoyed that quite a lot. Congratulations on this awesome game!
That part was incredibly satisfying to me. I'm glad you got to experience it too.
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!
help! where are the saved games? I started last night and came back today and can't find my save!
This likely means that your browser isn't allowing the game to save cookies or there is an issue with an adblocker.
If you come to the discord I (or someone else) can set you up with a downloadable version of the game that will save your file locally instead of into your browser data.
I am now 3 hours in- do you think if I just shut my laptop and reopen it, it will work later? thanks for this info
I'm not sure. I wouldn't trust it if it didn't work the first time. If you run into any kind of bug near the end of the game due to not being able to save I'd really not want for you to have to start over
where can I find the aforementioned discord? I want a downloadable version, it is not working at all on my browser sadly
The discord is found on the main menu of the game. If you mean that the main menu won't even come up in your current browser, you should be able to temporarily open it in a different browser, and click the discord link there. (Don't bother playing it in a browser that's unfamiliar with you, you can close that browser once you click the discord link)
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 can’t find Rhoses name on the thing and I’ve tried looking her up and relative things and i can’t find her please help :(
make sure you've searched everything that spidersearch has given you, including making sure you spell things right with punctuation
I went by vibes only for the final spouses' names and it worked. maybe I've become a Roottree.
okay so i just started playing good game so far but i cant find one os the people at the start of the game
You're going to need to do a bit more research specifically into the person you're missing.
If you search for her name directly on the search engine, it will give you some general search tips on how to track individual people down. This includes searching for things associated with them like product and brand names.
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 is an amazing game! Reminds me of Obra Dinn. I'm still around the beginning, but I can't wait to keep playing! :)
I finished it! My bad for the deleted post, I messed up while trying to add a reply.
I didn't connect a lot of the pieces until the end of the game, but I still ended up missing only 2 entries! The locked picture had me messed up in the earlier game (lol), and I couldn't figure out the surname for the second locked person. I overlooked a lot of clues in hindsight or straight up forgot about them, but the notebook feature was incredibly useful, because I was able to write down key points I'd found out and not have to seek the sources out again (mostly).
If you're planning on playing this, I'd really recommend to do the same! If something seems even a bit important, write it down in your notebook. And even if you've already looked at something, it's very useful to go back multiple times. Pay attention to the intuition points!!
Anyways, I love this game. I'm going to replay it in a year or two, once I've lost all memory of the mystery. To whoever is reading this, have a great day! ^^
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
Im stuck with Elias C Job
For this one you're gonna wanna look more into one of the Notable Roottree who is directly connected to Eli C.
Be sure to re-read any resources you found when looking into him the first time, especially the ones that are also listed on the periodicals page of your notepad.
Have you ever thought about launching this app for mobile? It seems like a great game to play to pass the time.
Most mobile games are meant to be played across many short sessions, with good breaks between the gameplay. I think that generally this game has a bit too much reading and note-taking and cross referencing to make it an ideal game for playing in short bursts.
Oh yeah. Makes sense
I wish you were selling this game, so that I could pay you for it. Do you accept donations?
Also, out of curiosity: do you have a connection to the Pittsburgh region, or did you just pick that as a locale for the game at random?
Peter @ Tea Leaves Programming (http://youtube.com/TeaLeavesProgramming)
Incidentally - I managed to lose all my progress when I was just 4 squares away from finishing. The save game system needs a little love!
I'm really sorry to hear about your save problems. I'm not sure what more I can do. It's saving to a file that's essentially out of my control. As for my connection to the Pittsburgh region, you can read more about that by searching for the local in-game periodical from that region... but the answer is no. I just picked it at random as a place that sounded reasonable.
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.
does anyone know how to find the extra two pictures of some siblings? I've filled out everything else and finished the game already but its bugging me that those two are the only things left
I prefer, if you could, remove the names of those people. Maybe just say "some siblings".
I can try to be super vague here but give you enough to find it. It's not on a website though you need the computer. Check the older resources related to the job of the more well known one.
sorry, removed the names. thanks for the tip, I was finally able to get it 100% complete! really great game
This was also my final optional piece! Thanks for a great game, I've already wishlisted it on Steam!
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
loving the game so much - i've been hearing mentions of a discord around, but i can't seem to find it. anyone have the link?
It's in the menu of the game, you can get there from settings.
thank you!!!
it only appears a black screen :(
Hello! I'm really enjoying my time with this game, I did the first three names and closed the game to spend more time later mulling over the puzzles. However, when I clicked the "skip" button during the intro, it directed me to the "Thanks for Playing!" screen. When I clicked the "title" button, it redirected me to the title and I was able to click "skip" normally, but the game proceeded to throw all kinds of strange bugs--acting like I had finished the game when trying to apply a new picture to a profile. Just noting it as a potential bug!
This is very good indeed!
search time cube lmao
Fantastic game! Me and my wife played it all in one evening. The puzzles were great, and the intuition system was both helpful and infuriating. We would go back to some evidence and wonder how on earth there was more to get from it, then we would eventually find it and be like Hell Yea. We had a great time.
-Spoiler-
We ended up never finding the Silver Screen periodical or that other Romance novel, so those were interesting to see in the ending.
best detective game ive played
Really solid stuff! I thoroughly enjoyed your game after it was recommended to me because I liked Return of the Obra Dinn. There were no unfair mysteries, everything fell into place neatly. Getting to manually enter the final section felt good, especially because I was right! Bravo.
I sometimes get a bit of glitching of text in the game's computer searches. I need to search for something else as refreshing the same search doesn't update.
Additionally, I was having a difficult time trying to find the true name for "Wild Bill" Williams. Neither Periodicals nor Search was able to help. Was I supposed to assume the rumours were true and look for a book written by Marilyn Monroe (or Norma Jeane Mortenson) to see if there was an expose about ol' creepily charming Bill? It's so easy to overthink things.
I'm coming to the realisation that I should write down information into real notebooks. It's easy to take too many notes. I started thinking that the birth years of the people was going to be important.
In time, are you looking to eventually release the game files here on itch for paid download? (Some of us may have issues with Discord's EULA)
I am not planning on releasing a paid version here on itchio. As for the name you were missing, there is a periodical that you likely didn't find. It's mentioned offhand in a pretty major book (the main one in the game) and some people skip right over it because it feels a bit like "lore".