The Roottrees are Dead

2025-01-03
"The centerpiece is a series of full color nude self portraits at different ages, stretching from 25-30. They certainly have NOT been added to your evidence." Man fuck this game.

But actually that's the sultry secret of The Roottrees Are Dead: it's the least sexy game on earth and that's good. We're not here to leer at Lara Croft's hot polygonal ass or rip some nasty no-scope headshots. No, we're here to look up books in the library, scrawl aged web pages, and pore over yellowed newspaper articles all to piece together some fragments of information just to discover someone's occupation. For some they'll have fallen asleep reading that sentence. But if you're one of those freaks like me who reads that and lets out a breathy "Ohhhh yeaaaaaah" then you're in for a treat.

Roottrees has succeeded at an attempt to sublimate Obra Dinn's sleuthing deduction parade down into a 2D form. No longer are we pacing the poop deck puzzling out who someone is based on where they were standing or what they were doing. Now we're trawling written records on a circa 2000 computer. It's all pictures and journals and books and it's all wonderfully cohesive. The art style, especially the design of the retro computer and the menagerie of weird faux-realistic Roottree faces, really makes you feel like some weirdo digging up dirt in their 1997 bedroom.

Or maybe it's the music. I mean maybe you'll say it's on the nose for a detective game to have a predominantly jazz soundtrack but it's a trope for a reason, yeah? To sit down with a cup of coffee and do some digging while a saxophone plays in the background is immediately pleasing in a way few other things are. What's also fascinating is checking out the artists for the tracks I found the core original music was from a couple of Fiverr composers while the rest was padded out with Kevin MacLeod royalty-free joints. Goes to show you having a clear artistic vision can go a lot farther than a big budget.

Sure, it doesn't hit the same as the Obra Dinn--something tells me nothing ever will--but it's the closest thing I've found so far. And that, it turns out, counts for a lot.