Really enjoyed The Roottrees Are Dead
I love deduction/investigation/research puzzle games - there is no good genre name for these yet - and I was surprised to discover that The Roottrees Are Dead is far and away the longest of these I've ever played. I loved it! Each campaign took me around 5 hours, and the game comes with two campaigns.
You play a genealogy researcher working in the late 90s, when DNA testing existed but was less accessible. You've been assigned to confirm the identities of a sprawling family of Pennsylvanian candy moguls who each hold shares, by birthright, to a massive candy fortune.
You spend most of your time browsing recreations of late-90s-style libraries, newspaper archives, and websites, snipping out chunks of text with a highlighter feature and taking notes in a notebook. When you've got enough information, you must lock three pieces of information for each relevant person on the Roottree family tree: name, photograph, and occupation.
I appreciated that this research mechanic allowed me to recreate precisely my research process for papers in college: making a gigantic list of text snippets with zero notes or editorialization whatsoever, reading the whole stack, and then writing my take at the bottom. Very satisfying!
I also appreciated how the game's mechanics changed and evolved over the course of the game. The first campaign allows for a bit of elimination-based guesswork regarding character names, while the second campaign makes a subtle design/UI change that restricts your ability to guess via elimination, and requires you to find more information before you begin locking character names. This also turns the discovery of a character name into a more involved, triumphant process.
There are a few progress milestones in each campaign which will trigger a bit of story and show an NPC giving you a new pile of documents. This allows the story to introduce a character's name or identity early on... but to withhold their key data, like the photographs you need to lock their place in the family tree. Since there are three separate pieces of data you need to lock each major character in the tree, they've got a bunch of different types of data to trickle out, and many different ways to make this feel naturalistic within the story. Withholding a name from the player but giving them a mysterious photograph, for example, feels very different than it does when the game withholds a photo while supplying the clues for a name. I did different things when I encountered each of those research roadblocks.
The visual communication possible in the photos is pretty interesting - there are clues involving characters' hair colors, race, clothing decisions, ages, and so on which can only be gleaned from the photos, not the text evidence. I understand that the original version of the game used AI art for these photos - I am so glad they changed it! I cannot imagine AI art being so good at communicating so many precise and controlled facts in the deep background of images, or in huge group shots. Characters who appear multiple times at different ages have good consistency in their looks - there are times in this game when you'll see a character and just be like, "Oh damn. Yeah, that's a Roottree. They look like their parent."
I think the best and most interesting design decision here, however, is the decision to not fully recreate most webpages or documents. There are a good number of recreated documents like magazine and album covers to browse... but this is not like Hypnospace Outlaw. Websites, in particular, are curtailed. Instead of full fantasy webpages, they are actually descriptions of YOU reading a webpage. You get a little narrated description of your experience searching for that keyword - how many useless pages you found, for example, or what the website you found the data on looks like, or what it feels like to use. The descriptions are pretty funny a lot of the time, too. I really like that there's no need to sift through any complex visual data or page layouts. The search summaries allow you to focus on the clues you're getting and the keywords you're finding instead.
Here's a relatively safe example I found in the very first few minutes of the game. You'll notice that instead of making me navigate a bunch of pages with fully recreated, info-dense news articles, the text just describes information I found "according to news sites." The sites are not important, so they're not named. It just narrates my experience as a researcher to me and cuts out any detail that could be distracting or slow me down.
The first few pages are filled with news results about the plane crash. Besides that, there are countless advertisements and conversations about the various products made by the Roottree Candy Company.
Most articles mention Carl Roottree, who was the president of the Roottree Candy Company. His daughters are also eulogized. Collectively referred to as "The Roottree Sisters," they've ben famous from a very early age.
I really like this! It's something that more research games should copy. I've looked into the burden of fully recreating documents for a game like this, and the work involved in embracing real documents, full conversations, reams of text, etc. is absolutely massive. It's so much faster to just hammer out text, limit yourself to a short description... or to convey the unique flavor of old technology using UI only, rather than real content.
The descriptions of the various search results, articles, books, etc which feature in your research vary in how detailed they are. Some contain several paragraphs of text. But the number of visual assets is pretty low. When you find a photograph, a magazine cover, or a book you can actually read pages of, it's a huge deal, and very significant - all those visual assets are kept in their own section of the game UI and have a much more ceremonial presentation to the player. There's also a numerical clue value, called "intuition," assigned to each visual asset. This is another tool they've got for making you look closely at the assets which were most difficult for them to make.
I highly recommend checking this out! It really gripped me. I completed it in a single weekend.