Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Late at night, a knock at the door. A mysterious visitor says the three Roottree sisters have died in a plane crash along with their parents. Every member of their renowned family stands to gain a handsome inheritance following this tragic accident. The problem is working out who is actually a blood relative — Roottree family history is steeped in scandal and secrecy. This is where you come in. Your job is to use your detective skills to untangle the gnarled roots of the complex family tree.The Roottrees Are Dead is a game with a novel idea: turning a line of descent into a large-scale puzzle, a genealogical jigsaw that proves immensely satisfying to solve. Set in 1998, its main tool for investigation is a simulation of a rudimentary internet service through which you consult search engines, library databases and periodical archives to fill in the names, photos and jobs of each family member. You’ll get to know the confectionery magnate, the preacher and the Hollywood leading lady, and help determine who deserves a share of the inheritance.As novel as this premise is, The Roottrees Are Dead also draws direct influence from a group of recent indie titles staking out the contours of a new genre that could be termed “deduction games”. Here the challenge is based on your thinking rather than your reflexes. You must read texts or inspect scenes for clues and then use your own deductive reasoning to find the answers. It can be useful to keep a notebook handy.All of this might sound like homework, but these games are deeply compelling, partly because of how they respect your intelligence. Rather than having your hand held though endless tutorials, you have to think your way to moments of epiphany. When a new realisation sparks a chain reaction of understanding and the pieces suddenly fall into place, you feel like a bona fide genius.The best-known deduction game is ingenious detective mystery Return of the Obra Dinn, which casts players as an investigator for the East India Company on a 19th-century ship, tasked with deducing how each crew member died or disappeared. The other obvious influence on Roottrees is Her Story, a crime thriller that asks players to search through a database of police video interrogations to unravel a tangled story of deception.Both games inspired the Golden Idol series, in which players must solve crimes by looking at static tableaux of complex scenes; Chants of Sennaar, in which the challenge is learning a number of fictional languages in a beautiful location; The Forgotten City, in which the player stumbles upon a classical Roman settlement stuck in a deathless time loop; and Outer Wilds, in which you travel a miniature universe trying to divine the secrets of its planets. Each is brilliant and exists as a direct descendant of Obra Dinn and Her Story.It’s not uncommon in gaming for a single title to inspire so many games that it launches an entirely new genre. Unlike in cinema and literature, where genres often denote settings or themes, gaming genres tend to be grouped around gameplay mechanics. New genres are often named after the first game to pioneer the formula, resulting in a strange system of nomenclature that can prove impenetrable to non-gamers.Here are the big ones. “Soulslike” games, based on titles such as Dark Souls by the studio FromSoftware, are usually punishingly difficult and make you lose vital currency each time you die (unless you survive a nail-biting “corpse run” to recover it). “Roguelike” games, based on 1980 game Rogue, have you explore a dungeon where you must restart from scratch and rebuild your abilities each time you die. Popular examples include Hades, Returnal and Spelunky. Then there are “Metroidvania” games, a portmanteau of the Metroid and Castlevania series, action platformers with large maps that open up gradually as you gain new traversal abilities. Other titles that have sparked entire genres include Harvest Moon, which begot farming simulators; Dear Esther, which pioneered walking simulators; and the original Doom, which heralded “first person shooters” (once popularly known as “Doom clones”).Clunky genre names notwithstanding, the rapid rate of invention within game development is testament to the industry’s immense technological, artistic and conceptual creativity. It’s exciting to follow a medium in which genres emerge, become formalised, then subverted and remixed within a few short years. As a result, there are always new ways to play, catering to an increasingly broad spectrum of players and tastes. You could happily jump from one game to another for hours, exploring these proliferating styles and genres. Or you could just stay up until 3am playing The Roottrees Are Dead, even though you have work the next day, feverishly trying to fill in those six final blank spots in the family tree.
