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Yeah, I probably should have just believed Yahtzee: I guess deduction simulators really do need a kraken to show up from time to time to make things interesting.
The Roottrees Are Dead is…fine. Nothing more, nothing less. The “twist” might have been interesting or shocking had this game actually released in 1998 (and not been so obvious from the middle third of the game that I didn’t even realize it was a twist). But, as someone that lives in a west coast city in 2025, not so much. Had the game been instead filled with little dead ends like the one that leads to the twist, this might have been a very cool game – one where what isn’t said is just as important as what is.
It’s somewhat the Old Gods Rising problem – I play video games to explore fun worlds where Cthulhu is just around the corner, not ones where social problems that were being explored by Star Trek and Seinfeld in the ’90s (and I don’t even like Seinfeld) are supposed to make me gasp at the novelty against a very plain backdrop of the early internet. I want at least one spaceship or wizard or eldritch horror to show up. That may sound like a “me” problem, but I would argue that it is otherwise a very plain world that is built for the Roottrees – interesting only because you have to learn the ins and outs of a billionaire family and their distant relatives, which I must admit is not particularly riveting when real-life billionaire families have much more interesting skeletons in their closets.
It’s an enjoyable deduction puzzle, sure, but once I got to the end I had a definite feeling of “that’s it?” combined with “I guess there’s a second campaign, but I think I’m kinda done for now.” Tier Two, though I’ll still probably go back to play the second campaign in a couple days. I do, after all, like deduction puzzles, and – as long as that’s all I expect – it’s a fun way to pass a half dozen hours.