The Roottrees are Dead, or, 5 Easy Pieces

The Roottrees are Dead is a deduction game by Jeremy Johnston set in 1998, which tasks you with doing online research to complete the family tree of a trio of very famous teen models. The history of the game itself is pretty interesting. I’d have more details if I hadn’t spent the last six hours doing fake internet searches and wanted to dive deeper into real ones. But I did immediately find that it was begun as a game jam project, which Johnston later released as a free browser game using art created by Midjourney. In 2025, a remastered version led by Robin Ward, with real art by Henning Ludvigsen, was released on Steam. And the developers have just released The Incident at Galley House, which is a remaster of another browser-based text-only game called Type Help. Finding out that the original solo project used Midjourney was interesting, since one of the most compelling draws of the game for me (apart from the buzz I’d been hearing online) was the title art. It’s a depiction of the…