In recent years, much has been made of social media’s role in disseminating urban legends, malicious hoaxes, and outright political disinformation. No one seems to be immune, whether it’s your racist great-uncle ranting about abortion-powered Mexican fentanyl factories or an impressionable Gen Alpha parroting the anti-vaxxer word salad that has inexplicably wriggled its way into their dance-heavy TikTok feed. This is but one aspect of the ongoing enshittification of most online platforms – and, indeed, virtually every aspect of modern existence – a process in which the last vestiges of usability (never mind joy) are demolished by a tsunami of feed-choking bots, deceptive ads, subscription hustles, and other petty digital miseries.
In this increasingly dire online landscape, it’s easy to overlook the fundamental miracle of our era: ease of access to information. Wikipedia, for all its advantages and drawbacks, is only the tip of the iceberg. Effectively limitless knowledge about history, science, and culture is only a few taps away via smartphone. We are now living in a slightly less farcical version of the reality imagined in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wherein anyone can consult the portable computer in their pocket about any topic imaginable. A cynic might say that we haven’t done much with all this awesome power at our fingertips, beyond cheating at bar trivia and settling arguments about pop-cultural minutiae. Yet the ease of access is, in a sense, the point: We might not know off the top of heads how many people died in the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, but we could find out in less than 10 seconds, cell or WiFi signal permitting. (At least 36,417, for the record.)
It wasn’t always this way. In its earlier days, the internet was a kludgier and more misshapen space, existing in a strange informational netherworld between the local branch library, a public-access television station, and the underground ’zine rack at the corner music store. Web searches were inefficient and clunky, and the institutional authorities for various subjects hadn’t yet solidified. Let’s say you wanted to identify the sound engineer on Jethro Tull’s 1969 sophomore studio LP, Stand Up, but didn’t have a copy of the album. You could post your question to a prog-rock-specific Usenet newsgroup and hope for a non-trolling answer from some rando on the other side of the world. Or you might stumble onto what you’re looking for on a fan-made Geocities site with a surprisingly comprehensive discography buried in its eye-wateringly bad graphic design.
Set explicitly in December 1998, the marvelous indie mystery puzzler The Roottrees Are Dead is about this gawky adolescent phase of the internet, when everything felt vaguely user-unfriendly and a specific morsel of information might prove to be frustratingly elusive. The player takes on the role of a nameless armchair investigator, tasked by a shadowy stranger to untangle the vast genealogical spider web that is the Roottree family. Five generations ago, old Elias Roottree took his wife’s struggling maple-syrup farm and transformed it into a globe-spanning confectionary empire. As with most American business dynasties, the Roottree family history is chockablock with secrets, scandals, and closeted skeletons. In the wake of a recent tragedy that wiped out an entire sub-branch of the clan, your job is to unearth every corner of the Roottrees’ sprawling ancestry, armed with little more than a dial-up connection and a library card.
The original The Roottrees Are Dead was created by Jeremy Johnston as a part of the 2023 Global Game Jam and distributed for free on the itch.io platform. Another indie game developer, Evil Trout, was so impressed that they reached out to Johnson about collaborating on a commercial remake of the game. Evil Trout’s updated version – with an improved interface, remastered audio, and professional illustrations (replacing the AI art used in the free version) – is now available on Steam, where it has enjoyed great critical success. It doesn’t hurt that gaming journalist A-lister Jason Schrerier was raving about the remake early this year; his enthusiastic endorsement on the Triple Click podcast was where I first caught wind of The Roottrees Are Dead.
Players who have grooved on indie mystery games like The Case of the Golden Idol, Return of the Obra Din, and This Bed We Made will probably click with The Roottrees Are Dead. The unobtrusive, jazzy score also plucked at this old-school gamer’s fond memories of Peter McConnell’s iconic work on LucasArts’ 1998 graphic adventure Grim Fandango. Yet there’s something gratifyingly distinctive about the narrow window created by TRAD’s elegantly simple interface. In contrast to other mystery titles that require the player to roam around a 3D environment or click on retro pixel-art tableaus, the entirety of TRAD essentially plays out in one room, where the tools at your disposal consist of a computer, a notebook, a folder of evidence, and a bulletin board displaying the tangled lineage of the Roottree family. Initially, this genealogy is a sea of blank spaces and question marks: The player completes the game by filling in the name, photo, and occupation of every blood descendant of Elias Roottree.
TRAD checks a lot of boxes, as puzzle games go. It’s an addictive yet relatively short experience: I completed the main game in about six hours, and although I had to leave a few optional nodes on the family tree maddeningly blank, I did manage to solve the game’s final, keystone mystery on my own. The interface is easy to navigate and has a satisfying, “clicky” responsiveness, with pleasing visual and audio feedback. However, TROD’s most conspicuous achievement might be the way it gamifies the clumsiness of mid-to-late-1990s internet sleuthing – as well as the general obscurity of information at the sunset of the analog age.
In 2025, a prominent American family like the Roottrees would have their own Wikipedia page, complete with an exhaustive genealogy. (The fifth generation would also probably be full of Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch influencers.) In the 56 kbit/s world of 1998, your sleuth is obliged to Google – sorry, “SpiderSearch” – for the handful of Roottrees possessing a public persona, cultural cachet, or legal notoriety. Then it’s off to the investigative races as these searches lead via winding paths to various books, articles, advertisements, photographs, and dubious conspiratorial websites. Your shadowy benefactor will show up at a few key intervals to offer some additional evidence and general encouragement. If you feel utterly stuck, the game blessedly includes a generous, step-wise hint system.
Sorting out the family’s genealogy is complicated by the Roottrees’ infuriating habit of referring to each other by nicknames – and by their Games of Thrones-like penchant for giving their children the same damn names, generation after generation. (So many Elis and Eliases.) However, the primary obstacle confronting you is the half-baked nature of the ’90s-era web, which is replete with unfinished sites, broken links, and sketchy sources. The interfaces-within-the-interface are period-appropriate in their frustrating cruftiness: The local library is a key source of out-of-print books and periodicals, but their crummy electronic card catalog requires you to type both the title and author exactly right to obtain any search results. It’s a testament to the game’s craft that these elements feel charming rather than annoying. TRAD bestows just enough friction on the investigative process that it feels like an achievement when you hit on the right syntax for your search terms.
It’s also not incidental that TRAD takes place at a time when vast swaths of 20th-century pop culture were still languishing in relative obscurity. Eventually, your investigations reveal that one of Elias’ granddaughters was briefly a C-list movie actor in the 1950s. However, her handful of all-but-forgotten features are unavailable on home video, leaving you with little in the way of leads but brief descriptions on poorly maintained Classic Hollywood fan sites. (Things have improved somewhat – IMDb has mutated from an obscure, Usenet-based data set to a massive, Amazon-owned resource – but cineastes are still raising hell over issues like streaming availability, physical media, and film preservation.) Similar informational roadblocks appear when it comes to the various Roottree relations who have dabbled in art, music, and literature. The game makes it feel like a genuine Rosetta Stone moment when you uncover a rare reprinting of a key memoir, complete with new annotations that shed light on important moments in the family history.
Seasoned gamers will easily discern the seams in TRAD’s methods, such as the way that it intentionally conceals information that it wants the player to puzzle out through Holmesian deduction. Hence the proliferation of intentionally vague references like “Uncle E.” and “my brother” in the Roottrees’ writings – Which brother?! You have three! – or the way that a particular person’s face might be strategically obfuscated in a photograph. Yet while the hand-crafted character of TRAD’s mysteries might be noticeable, that artificiality dovetails winningly with the game’s broader, retro sensibility. It evokes a time where finding an answer to any given question was a little more challenging, requiring the would-be detective to follow a more meandering (and perhaps more interesting) path.
The Roottrees Are Dead is now available on Steam for Windows and MacOS.
