The Roottrees are Dead news & patch notes

Jeremy sat down with Murray from Wax Heads to discuss game design, writing, and 80s music. You can watch the whole interview here:

We're also delighted to announce that we'll be in a Steam bundle with Wax Heads when it releases on May 5. (It's also available on Switch, PS5 and Xbox.).

In December we launched The Roottrees are Dead in Simplified Chinese, and we were blown away by how well it was received. Within two weeks it had outsold every language except for English, and it continues to be played and well reviewed by new players every day.

We wanted to thank our Chinese players by providing an update to the game which includes full voice acting in Mandarin. It is available today as a free game update. This was only possible because of all the Chinese speaking fans and their wonderful support.

Of course, if you'd like to stick to the original English voice over, that option still exists. You can customize your own experience with the game.

Thanks again, and we hope you will also enjoy our upcoming game, The Incident at Galley House, which will have a Simplified Chinese translation upon release.

The Roottrees are Dead is now available in Brazilian Portuguese.

This is great timing, because we've also just been nominated for Best Narrative at the gamescom latam BIG Festival.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this translation happen!

P.S. Italian is next.

Greetings, genealogists!

Over the last year, we’ve learned a few things about our players around the world, including how pricing works in different countries. While Steam provides recommended regional prices, developers can adjust them to better reflect local purchasing power.

We’ve taken a close look at how Roottrees is priced in parts of Latin America and lowered our regional pricing to make it more accessible to local players. This changes are now live, and they affect Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Steam’s USD-LATAM region.

This isn’t meant as a sale or temporary discount, but more like a pricing alignment that makes more sense for the regions we serve.

When we set out to create this fictional family, we certainly didn’t expect to be thinking about real-world things like exchange rates and purchasing power parity! But we want as many people as possible to enjoy our game, so we hope this is a welcome change. We’ll keep looking at other regions too, especially as we continue our translation work.

Thanks again for playing, reviewing, sharing and bringing your friends and family into the mystery. It means the world to us. Happy sleuthing!

The Roottrees are Dead has now been out for a whole year on Steam, and it’s been a wild ride! When we started this project, we only had a vague hunch that people would enjoy a game like this enough to buy it. We had no idea how many people it would reach and how well it would be received. Here’s some highlights:

• We’ve sold over 200,000 copies of the game. That’s a mind-boggling number for a small studio like ours.

• We received an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam from our players, with thousands of reviews.

• We made “Best of” lists for many publications such as The New York Times, NPR, Bloomberg, The Economist, Game Informer, GameSpot, Game Rant, The AV Club and Polygon.

• We were nominated for an Indie Game Award, a GLAAD award, plus an honorable mention for Best Narrative at the IGF Awards.

It was also a busy year at Evil Trout Inc.:

• With the help of many excellent translators, we added support for French, German, Spanish and Simplified Chinese, with a Brazilian Portuguese translation now in progress.

• We released an official soundtrack on Steam. It’s free if you own the game.

• We ran a small puzzle hunt for our avid Discord members that culminated in the announcement of our next game, The Incident at Galley House. It’s a remaster of the IGF-nominated game Type Help. It will be out this year. We don’t have a date to share yet, but we plan on releasing a trailer when we’re ready to announce it.

Once again, we’d love to thank all our fans for your support, your feedback, and for bringing your friends and family into the mystery. You are the best and made our dreams come true.

Hello Genealogists!

We’re excited to announce that as of today The Roottrees are Dead has been translated into Simplified Chinese! This is our most ambitious translation yet, as there is less overlap between Chinese and English than there was with French, German, and Spanish. In addition to translating all of the search results, we’ve revisited everything with text. This includes names on the tree, and evidence such as print advertisements and stickers on album covers!

It has been fun to watch the project come together, seeing familiar art with an entirely new look to it. Now we’re happy to share it with you just in time for the Steam Winter Sale.

As always, if you find any issues related to the translation please post them in our discord’s bug channel. It might take a bit more effort to fix as we’ll need to consult our translators, but we are committed to making sure that the game works well in every language option.

The Steam Awards are currently accepting nominations, and if you enjoyed The Roottrees are Dead, nominating us would be really appreciated!

We think we're a good fit for the Most Innovate Gameplay category, since there aren't many games about genealogy out there and we think our take on it is somewhat original. If you agree, you know what to do :)

Thanks!

We're delighted to be bundled with Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game as part of the Cozy Crimes Bundle.

You can pick up both games for 20% off, and we recommend you do!

After many months of hard work and an open beta, we're delighted to announce that you can now play The Roottrees are Dead in French, German, and Spanish.

The game has roughly 100,000 words to translate, which is the length of a novel! Most players won't find every word of content, but it's important that it's all there for players who dig deep into our game universe.

We're also happy to announce that we've begun translating the game into Simplified Chinese.

Now even more armchair detectives can solve the mysteries of the Roottree family!

Last week we reached a major sales milestone: The Roottrees are Dead has sold over 100,000 copies on Steam!

This is mind-blowing. We never expected so many people to enjoy our little game, and the response has been overwhelming. It has exceeded every expectation we had, and we can't express how thankful we are.

Later this month, we'll be releasing translations in Spanish, German and French, which we hope will allow even more players around the world to experience the intricacies of the mysterious Roottree family.

We also have launched the Steam page for our next project: The Incident at Galley House - if you enjoyed Roottrees and want to continue supporting us, one of the best things you could do is add it to your wishlist.

Again, thank you all so much!

-- The Roottrees Dev Team

• Added a banner to the main menu for our new game, The Incident at Galley House.
• Fixed more typos
• Made one of Alphabet Davis' book titles more consistent
• Updated translation support (coming soon!)