The Roottrees are Dead Review – Tracing family roots

You have the most cutting-edge technology of 1998: a chunky home computer, internet access using AOL, and a home laser printer that can print out your evidence in full colour. So how do you find the clues you need to link the family together? The same way you’d do it in real life, of course: Google as many keywords and phrases as you can find! (or “SpiderSearch” as the case may be). Styled to look like a real search result, the text will describe what relevant information you find, if any. It’s totally intuitive, meaning it’s easy to launch into your investigation. You also have at your disposal the online archive of various publications and books, which may reveal more in-depth evidence than a SpiderSearch can tell you. You need to use all of them in combination to find all the clues: articles, advertisements, books, diaries, magazine covers, old photos, songs, interviews, and more. It’s incredibly extensive. The visuals are all very simple, which makes sense for the software — the internet back then did look pretty bare-bones — but it makes the game’s main UI look a bit cheap. Contrasted against the extremely detailed photo evidence and magazine covers, it’s a bit of an odd look. The note-taking system is functional enough to be useful, but gets hard to navigate the more you use it, and while you can press CTRL+C to copy keyphrases, it doesn’t always work across your various databases. It’s inconsistent enough that I never understood when to expect a copy to work or not. This stuff is unlikely to bother you for long, though, because the game is just so engrossing.