Break out your floppy disks, because it’s time to solve a mystery.
Cheat codes and lucky guesses won’t help you through The Roottrees Are Dead, a deduction-based puzzle game originally developed by solo developer and mystery game aficionado Jeremy Johnston and rereleased on Steam after a comprehensive remake and expansion by Evil Trout’s Robin Ward.
When a plane crash kills candy company CEO Carl Roottree, his fashion mogul wife Brenda, and his three famous model daughters, everyone’s dialing into the latest web forums to find out what happened — and who, exactly, will get the Roottree family money.
Tasked by a mysterious stranger to fill out the Roottree family tree, players wield the best desktop computer of 1998 to match names, photos, and occupations of this sprawling family. Get three right, and a little jingle lets you know to cross them off the list.
Sleuthing isn’t skin-deep. In The Roottrees Are Dead, it’s logical reasoning or nothing. Players scour early Internet forums, digitized periodicals, and other relics of the Y2K era to pull together the clues using little but their own deduction skills.
Those who aren’t cut out for the detective life’s leisurely pacing can take advantage of the game’s hint system, but it is encouraged for players to sniff the roses if they can.
You may end up repeatedly combing your search engine history while recreating Charlie Kelly’s unhinged breakdown in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on your evidence board, but there’s little in gaming more satisfying than hearing that locked-in jingle.
Since the annoyances of dial-up internet have faded with time, the game’s playful reminders of the long-gone quirky early Internet triggers powerful waves of nostalgia for everything from ’90s sitcoms to invasive banner ads.
The early Internet’s limitations are a wonderful way of preventing the player from finding simple answers by Googling everything.
The results walk the razor thin line of balancing difficulty with player agency. When done right, The Roottrees Are Dead directly rewards player discovery, and player discovery is, at the core, what it’s all about.
When I found myself overwhelmed by the game’s open-ended final question, I set the game down rather than rush to a reckless solution. Before the end of the day, I had a eureka moment while driving that made my entering the final answer more satisfying than any Fortnite match.
Before anyone relegates The Roottrees Are Dead to the domain of insufferable know-it-alls, the game goes out of its way to feed players new information.
This presentation is occasionally clunky. As much its premise wants to stay 100 percent plausible, the way characters dole out information in manageable chunks stretches the suspension of disbelief. There must be a better way, but for now, the tradeoff of tighter, more intuitive gameplay is worth the stiltedness.
Developed for the 2023 Global Game Jam, an international event where video game creators of all skill levels participate by building a new title from scratch, The Roottrees Are Dead was initially released for free on itch.io.
While it can still be played there, Johnston partnered with Robin Ward of the publisher Evil Trout to upgrade and streamline the game’s interface. Its 2025 release added replaced AI art with artist-created illustrations, beefed up puzzles, expanded the story, fixed bugs, and made important quality of life improvements.
A lingering awkwardness in the game’s controls and animations will hamper the game for some, but these issues are minor and, considering the small team, mostly charming. While there are a few design elements that I prefer in the itch.io version, the Steam edition is a vast improvement that will bring the title to a much wider audience.
And we haven’t even brought Roottreemania into it! The 2025 version of the game comes with an additional mystery. Built on the bones of the Roottree family tree, Roottreemania can only be unlocked after completing the first game.
This new mystery was as engrossing as the first; It can be played over a weekend, and one might emerge dazed and confused come Monday. However, while the gameplay satisfied, the game’s ending was strangely Saltburn-esque in its anti-poor messaging. While likely unintentional, it soured the game’s final notes.
The Roottrees Are Dead isn’t for everyone, but those who love it won’t forget it.
With deductive-reasoning games in short supply, I’ve recommended the game to everyone I know just so I can live in that world a little bit longer, even if it’s just to hear someone else figure out the difference between Elias C. Roottree and Elias M. Roottree.
One suddenly understands the urge to create that Johnston had after playing the similarly styled mystery game 2018’s Return of the Obra Dinn, as well as why Ward loved the game enough to reach out about doing a comprehensive remake.
I want a Men in Black neuralyzer to wipe my memory so I can play fresh, I’ll eagerly await whatever Jeremy Johnston — or the next developer inspired by him — does next.
First Published March 17, 2025, 11:00 a.m.
