The Roottrees are Dead

The Roottrees are Dead is a quiet investigation: early-internet clues lead to family connections and a tree to complete. For solo players who enjoy deduction, ≈ $17.57 at GAMIVO is a direct way into the mystery; the Steam version also includes an additional family puzzle. Steam is currently $19.99; this offer saves ≈ $2.42 against the comparable Steam base game.

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96%Steam Reviews10K reviews86Metacritic/10086OpenCritic/100

Released: Jan 15, 2025

Detective · Puzzle · Mystery · Point & Click · Investigation

GAMIVOThe Roottrees are Dead EN/DE/FR/ZH/MX Global·Platform:·Checked 2026-10-18-12%from~ $17.57(~ €15.61)Save $2.42 vs SteamBuy now

Steam·Platform:·United States Steam official price~ $19.99Buy now

KinguinThe Roottrees are Dead PC Steam Altergift·Platform:·Checked 2026-10-19from~ $24.71(~ €21.96)Buy now

All-time low ~ $14.99across Steam & third-party stores

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Price History

Past 36 months · Updated daily

Historical Low~ $14.992025-03Current Low Across Stores~ $19.99Steamvs. Historical Low+33%

Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.

01About The Roottrees are Dead

In 1998, a plane crash leaves an inheritance question: who truly belongs to the Roottree family? Search the early internet for photos, books and articles, connect the clues, and fill in the family tree. Each correct placement narrows the remaining possibilities, while the evidence becomes harder to uncover. Steam players rate it 96% across 9,966 reviews. Interface languages: Simplified Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish-Latin America, Portuguese-Brazil, Italian, and Russian. Released January 15, 2025.

Credits

Developer

Evil Trout Inc.

Publisher

Evil Trout Inc.

Steam player reviews

96%positiveOverwhelmingly Positive9,966 Steam reviews

Lowest recorded in 36 months

$14.992025-03-13 · SteamBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.

Language support

Language	Interface	Subtitles	Audio
Simplified Chinese	Yes	Yes	Yes
English	Yes	Yes	Yes
French	Yes	Yes	—

Show 5 more languages

Language	Interface	Subtitles	Audio
German	Yes	Yes	—
Spanish-Latin America	Yes	Yes	—
Portuguese-Brazil	Yes	Yes	—
Italian	Yes	Yes	—
Russian	Yes	Yes	—

Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19

02Before you buy

Investigation and deduction

The Steam PC game centers on genealogical deduction, with clues found through photos, books and articles from the early internet.

Language and audio

Interface languages include {supportedLanguages}; English and Simplified Chinese also have full audio.

Play mode

The Steam PC version is single-player and supports Steam Cloud.

03Frequently asked questions

What do you do in the game?

You search for clues and place names and photos in the correct positions on a family tree.

Is there another mystery?

Yes. The Steam version includes “Roottreemania,” a new mystery with another family tree.

What is the story about?

The story begins in 1998 with a Roottree Corporation jet crash and a disputed inheritance.

Popular Steam reviews

Native-language selection · 10 reviews

Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.

RecommendedSteam player

12/28/2025

I'm fairly new to being a gamer and I'm still figuring out what my tastes are... I loved Unpacking but hated A Little to the Left; The Witcher and BOTW/TOTK are super fun but I couldn't get into Skyrim and Cyberpunk 2077 was too scary for me (lol) because of the combat with guns. So I never know what I will or won't like until I'm actually playing it!! I have now realized I'm more of a puzzle person and coming into this game, I was in a post-Blue Prince and post-Inscryption slump and I didn't think I could find a game that would scratch that itch. That is, until I played this game. Now THIS game has become the Holy Grail... the game that has me yearning for similar games. As someone who loves going down Wikipedia wormholes late into the night, this game was perfect for me. I used to think I preferred playing on handheld consoles but The Roottrees are Dead has converted me to playing on a computer!!! This game is everything I've ever wanted in a game and I wish I could play it all over again...Show moreShow less

44.8 hours at review189 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

01/17/2025

This is one of those games I really wish had a 'mixed' option, but I'm going to err ever so slightly towards 'No' for now. I think it's most reasonable to look at TRaD as two games. There are essentially two campaigns - The Roottrees are Dead, the original story released for free in a game jam, and Roottreemania, a brand new campaign for the remake that picks up where the original story left off. The first campaign is fantastic. The difficulty progresses naturally, you uncover stories bit by bit, and it feels really satisfying when you put the pieces together and get your answers confirmed. The comparisons to Obra Dinn are apt, and it definitely scratches a similar itch. It even ends on a fairly satisfying conclusion with a final puzzle that puts everything else into perspective but has an answer you can see coming if you've been paying attention. Roottreemania, on the other hand, I have a lot of issues with. First off, it is considerably harder than the first story, but not in what I'd consider a good way. You already had to do a lot of awkward digging through minutiae in search of clues, but RTM doubles down on that in a way that feels almost asinine. I gave up about halfway through and started relying heavily on hints to progress...only for the final puzzle to come with its own huge question, and now the game won't even give you any clues. RTM also feels like it tries too hard to be clever. I understand that puzzle difficulty is subjective, but the first game felt like it was in the sweet spot for me. RTM feels more like it's trying to show off how smart it is, even if that impedes on the player's enjoyment. It gets to the point that the final cutscene explaining things is about five times longer than in TRaD and has a character say outright that it's unreasonable to expect anyone to put it together on their own. If that's the case, then why did you ask the player to do it?? So it's one game I really liked, and one game I really didn't. The dealbreaker is that, again, the part I enjoyed is mostly a game that's already available for free. This rerelease has obvious improvements in the graphics, UI, sound, etc, but I don't think it's enough to justify this big of a jump in price. And I wish I hadn't touched Roottreemania at all because it soured what had otherwise been a fun experience. Pick it up on sale, or if you really liked the free release and want to support the developer. Otherwise, I'd give this one a pass.Show moreShow less

14.1 hours at review48 people found this helpful

RecommendedSteam player

01/18/2025

A lot of people are comparing this game to Obra Dinn, and that is by some extent a true statement. Your goal is to identify people on a list - and that's kind of where the similarities end. Roottrees is not physically searching for clues and context. It is 95% reading and 5% tearing your hair out. It is the curated Wikipedia deep dive of your dreams. It is the information hunt for a dissertation you will never write. It is following threads of articles for an hour to find out someone's maiden name. It is developing personal beef with the name Elias. And it is audibly cheering when you finally figure out the birth order of too many siblings. Roottrees will scratch that particular itch for these particular people. And once you're all done - there's an even harder familiy tree to sort out. An absolute treat that I still haven't fully cracked. Occupation: Baby.Show moreShow less

9.6 hours at review158 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

03/10/2025

People will claim this is like the Obra Djinn or maybe Curse of the Golden Idol, and in a sense it is, but the issue is this game is basically all about digging for information through a completely arbitrary and archaic system. Obra Djinn presents you all the information you need in visual or audio clues, but here it's more of a slog parsing through information on the, let's be honest, unfriendly early period of the internet. It's more about continually copy/pasting new names or phrases into various search engines, no matter how obscure, and crossing your fingers to get some totally arbitrary results. Pop in the name of a president of a famous company? Nothing. What you 'should' have done is punch in some random name you came across once and who clearly isn't important in the scheme of things and crossed your finger it would magically create some new tangent. If that sounds like a good time, then you'll probably enjoy this game. I enjoyed it, for a time, but eventually the puzzles felt less logic based and more brute force based, being asked to search up basically any and all names/phrases you once came across without any logical ties before punching in said name to the names you need to figure out just feels tedious and exhausting. It's one thing to use logic to solve puzzles... it's another just punching in names and crossing your fingers.Show moreShow less

9.7 hours at review45 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

01/11/2026

This game consists of two parts: the first one is you combing the interwebs and some weird fictional libraries / periodicals to establish a family tree of some candy moguls. This is reasonably difficult, with main challenges coming from reading a lot of disjointed documents while the UI is not being very helpful. My main gripe with this part would be that the story turned out to be a total disappointment, with ending being less of a twist and more of a wet fart. The second part is working over the same family tree, but now you have to establish the adulteries and illegitimate offspring. This part is significantly harder, and a lot worse. First, the difficulty. A good portion of it comes from you having to go over all the previous evidence and internet articles - it is implied that 8 months have passed since the first case, and some new details could have turned up. The game gives some convenient hints, and puts all previous documentation in a separate tab, but it is really tedious. The UI, as usual does not help: want to google that person from the family tree? Welp, the quick google and copy buttons dont work on the family tree, search it in the documents to copypaste or enter it manually. Then there's new evidence, quite a lot of it, have fun dealing with it. The remainder of the difficulty is due to the level of deduction needed. This is perfectly legit, no issues here aside from the fact that the in-game notes tool is very unwieldy. My main gripe with the game would be that the story is not exciting, or interesting, or anything. The reason that the whole detective genre is usually centered around murder mysteries, occult paraphernalia and the like is because solving the mundane issues is boring. It is as if Sherlock Holmes was all about finding who was stealing some dude's chicken eggs in some rural middle-of-nowhere village, or Poirot cases boiling down to "one dude robbed another, fenced off the loot and drunk the money". The same applies here - you play the game, solve all the puzzles, and realize you spent the time figuring out who was screwed by some dude in the most literal way.Show moreShow less

12.4 hours at review33 people found this helpful

Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.