Wake Up, Sleeper, the Roottrees Are Dead | February/March Wrap-up
Pogs, main menus, and the ruins of interplanetary capitalism.
February and March flew. Between the personal sphere (work, house projects, traveling) and the public goings-on (Yay, technofeudalism! Let’s go, corporate oligarchy!), let’s just say I haven’t quite been in the right frame of mind for writing.
That’s alright, though! My intent for this space is to be flexible, and my pace might fluctuate at the whims of schedules, mental health, and other extenuating factors. My hope is to get at least a few pieces sent out each month, but for those times I go dark, thank you for your patience.
Now, with that out of the way, I played some great games these past 2 months, and some Mostly Okay™ ones. Let’s talk about them.
Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over the Age, 2022)
What does it mean to belong in a broken universe? To sit within the desiccated ruins of human ambition, forgotten in a cold corner of an indifferent cosmos—and try to find a home?
This is the question that animates Citizen Sleeper, a brilliant narrative RPG by Gareth Damian Martin. Iterating on mechanics from Disco Elysium and Mass Effect, and drawing inspiration from other science fiction like Blade Runner and Annihilation, Citizen Sleeper places you in the role of a doomed creature on the margins of society and asks you to make meaning in the chaos.
You are a Sleeper, someone who sold their consciousness to a corporation and had it placed within a cybernetic body to perform a lifetime of indentured servitude. After escaping from your owners, you stowed away on a freighter and are now trying to survive on a space station called Erlin’s Eye.
The situation is dire. As the game opens, you’re starving and only have pennies to your name. And because of how your body’s designed, each day brings you closer to a planned obsolescence that can only be delayed with a proprietary medicine you do not have and cannot find. Like other tabletop-inspired RPGs, your actions each day are determined by dice rolls, but those actions are extremely limited, due to your scant resources and the forced limitations of your body.
How, then, do you proceed? Do you expend your few short hours of energy working for meager pay? Do you risk meeting others on the station, knowing each connection could be the one sending you back into the grip of your oppressors? Do you look for an escape from Erlin’s Eye—or perhaps take a chance at carving a refuge for yourself amid the many dangers around you? Much of the genius in Citizen Sleeper’s design comes from this scarcity-driven gameplay. Each choice feels consequential, and all it takes is a couple dice rolls to either secure your safety for another day or condemn you to oblivion.
However, these mechanics would mean nothing without Martin’s incredible writing. The game is text-heavy, and it would be a slog to get through if each sentence wasn’t beautifully haunting in its construction, with careful world-building undergirding it. By the time I was finished, my phone was riddled with hastily-snapped screenshots of quotes I wanted to remember. Simply put, you will grow to love the denizens of Erlin’s Eye and care for their fates, and Erlin’s Eye functions well as an analogue to our own world, without falling prey to heavy-handed allegorizing.
There’s far more I could say—about the game’s excellent sound design and meticulous artwork, about the hopeful vision it creates of a life beyond the imposed scarcity of the game’s interplanetary capitalist structures—but I’ll leave that for you to discover. Suffice it to say that the ending is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve experienced in a game in quite some time, and it has stuck with me in the weeks since I finished it. Also, with the sequel having just released in January, I’m thrilled to know there’s more to come. See you on the Eye.
Yakuza Kiwami 2 (RGG Studio, 2017)
Those who’ve followed me on Twitter or Bluesky the past year know that I’ve been slowing working my way through the massive saga that is RGG Studio’s Yakuza series (or, as it’s now known, Like a Dragon) . What drives one to take on 10+ notoriously long games of varying quality? Patience? Stubbornness? The indomitable human spirit? An abiding love for mahjong and melodramatic mobsters?
I’ll leave that for the reader to ascertain, but I was surprised by how much I ended up enjoying Yakuza Kiwami 2 (A remake of the third game, chronologically, in the series), and as such, I haven’t given up on my journey yet.
I’ll admit, I was struggling with an overwhelming sense of sameyness for the first few chapters. Kiwami 2 starts slow, finding series stalwart Kazuma Kiryu abandoning the life of a yakuza to raise the daughter of his late lover. Of all the characters in these games, Kiryu is most deserving of a peaceful rest-of-life that always claims to be right around the corner, but wouldn’t you know it, the chairman of the Tojo Clan has been assassinated (again!), and the ensuing power struggle threatens the safety of his friends and allies (again!), causing him to jump right into the heart of the conflict (agaaaain!).
Gameplay-wise, this is the third consecutive entry to take place in Kamurocho, in an open-world largely unchanged from the last two. I’ve never been a huge fan of the brawler combat, but this (and Kiwami 1) feel like steps down in precision and variety from Yakuza 0. And by this point, I’ve had my fill of many of the repeated minigames and diversions. As supportive as I am of developers reusing assets and systems as needed in an industry that works them to the bone, I’m hoping that RGG finds *something* new for me to do in upcoming sequels.
I know what you’re thinking: Are you sure you enjoyed this? Is this a cry for help? Yes! And maybe! All I know is that around the halfway mark, something shifted in my mindset. I had to intentionally repress the urge to hurry through—and force myself to focus on what this game is doing, not what the next ones will do. As a result, the second and third act of the story really impressed me. Despite all the game’s tropes and absurdities, the writers have such a good handle on Kiryu as a character, and they know how to twist the narrative in ways that make his quiet heroicism tug on your heartstrings.
As bonkers as this series can be, playing through it has become oddly meditative, grounding me in what I’m presently doing, not looking ahead. And that, coupled with its endearing characters and charming eccentricities, is keeping me invested for the time being. That said, let’s hold off a month or two before tackling Yakuza 3.
The Roottrees Are Dead (Jeremy Johnston, 2025)
It takes meticulous planning to tell a story through a puzzle—to find the right balance of exposition and ambiguity that keeps your audience piqued without frustrating them or losing their interest. What’s more, depending on the type of puzzle you’re designing, you have to account for diverging paths: players will miss clues, overlook cues, and come to conclusions through wildly different lines of thought. How do you write a cogent plot on a canvas that’s endlessly folding in on itself at the whims of your audience?
Previous narrative mysteries like Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, and Lorelei & the Laser Eyes set the bar high for this style of storytelling, finding brilliant ways to hold the narrative reins without sacrificing player agency. And now, I’m happy to report that, seemingly out of nowhere, Jeremy Johnston’s The Roottrees Are Dead is a remarkable new addition to that pantheon.
The Roottree family is a (fictional) wealthy American dynasty, owners and heirs to a massive candy company based in rural PA (sound familiar?). However, when a plane crash claims the lives of the company’s president and his three daughters, you are tasked with filling out their family tree and determining who’s entitled to the family fortune.
Easy enough, right? A few minutes with Google and 23 & Me should be enough to call it a day. Not so fast. Because the game takes place in 1998, the Internet is fairly new to the scene, and online sources are limited. Your only tools are a rudimentary search engine, a local library site, and a database of old periodicals. The heart of the game, therefore, lies in knowing what to search for and how to follow the right digital rabbit trails to uncover the truth.
On paper, the premise could easily be boring or frustrating, but Johnston’s design chops keep the game engaging from start to end. Like Obra Dinn, once you correctly fill out 3 or 4 sections of the tree, the game will “lock in” those answers, letting you know what’s right and wrong, so you’re never stuck in the dark for long. It also helps that the Roottree family itself is incredibly fun to discover; in the long line of ancestors, you’ll uncover televangelists, movie stars, disco artists, hidden infidelities, and more, each holding their own bizarre pieces of the larger puzzle. The game taps into the excitement that we all feel when playing armchair detectives online.
Through these elements, the game tells a fun, if familiar, story about power and legacy. The writing can admittedly be uneven; the game’s responses to your search prompts are witty, but during the game’s few proper cutscenes, the dialogue is stilted and jarring. And it’s best not to interrogate the premise too much, as the logic behind what you’re doing is…flimsy, to say the least. Nonetheless, if you’re the type of person who enjoys sitting down to a puzzle on a rainy Sunday, or uncovering the motives of an eccentric group of suspects in an Agatha Christie novel, The Roottrees Are Dead has a lot to offer.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1 (Don’t Nod, 2025)
Let’s talk for a moment about an underappreciated element of game design: main menus. Outside of marketing, the main menu is the first opportunity for you to establish the tone of your game and set expectations. The soundtrack, the user interface, the visuals, the tactility—all of these play a role in hooking players and saying, unequivocally, this is what you’re signing up for. Some standouts that immediately come to mind include Psychonauts’s “brain menu,” Spec Ops: The Line’s upside-down flag, and the classic minimalism of Final Fantasy VII’s Buster Sword.
By this measure, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage deserves a round of applause. Someone who’s unaware of the game entirely would be able to watch the menu for 30 seconds and immediately get a sense of its plot, setting, and themes. At the top of the frame, 4 sets of legs dangle off a bridge in the woods, as a blazing-orange sun sets in the background. The visuals are blurry, and scan lines can be seen filtered over the logo, giving the sense that you’re viewing this scene through the lens of a camcorder or an old videotape. And all the while, calming synths and bass lines soothe you. After about 30 seconds pass, we hear our first vocals: We could be anything we want, anything at all…but it all means nothing without you.
Yes, I could tell you that Lost Records is a nostalgic coming-of-age tale set in the 90s: an homage to Stand By Me with a supernatural twist. But did I have to?
For those who are unaware, Lost Records is a spiritual successor to the Life is Strange series, which Don’t Nod created but eventually sold the rights to, and this game follows closely in its footsteps. You play as Swann, an excessively awkward teenager with a love for filmmaking, who happens to meet her new best friends just a few months before her family moves away. Swann’s obsession with movies means that you’ll be carrying your camcorder everywhere, and you have the freedom to record as you like and cut your clips into short films about life, love, and growing up. Like Life is Strange, you’ll do some light puzzle-solving, but most of the gameplay revolves around talking with your friends, studying your environments, and making difficult choices about the person you want to be.
This time around, the game also takes cues from the popularity of Yellowjackets, and has you switching between your childhood memories and the present-day, where you’re reuniting with your friend group for the first time in decades after something catastrophic split you all up. The past and present play on each other in subtle and smart ways, and so far, it feels natural rather than gimmicky. It’s fascinating to see the playful carefree kids teasing each other about childhood crushes, juxtaposed against the uncomfortable timidity of their adult counterparts, trying to rekindle their friendship after years of emotional distance.
The game is a slow-burn, and I’ve seen other reviewers bounce off it because of its leisurely stride, but right now, it’s working for me. Much of this story is in the quiet interactions between these characters, which would be lost with a quicker pace.
At the time of this writing, only Tape 1 (the first half of the game) has released, with Tape 2 set to come out later this month. Tape 1 ends with an effective twist and cliffhanger, but it’s not just the plot that will be bringing me back; it’s the meticulously-crafted sense of time and place, the furtive melancholy of returning to your past and knowing it can never be fully recovered.
This Bed We Made (Lowbirth Games, 2023)
This Bed We Made is a point-and-click murder mystery with a clever angle—rather than playing as the grizzled cop or eccentric private investigator, you’re a maid in an upscale hotel in the 1950s. You’ll spend the opening hours moving from room to room, making beds, emptying trash, and peeking into the private lives of the hotel guests. Eventually, you’ll stumble upon a body, and from that point, the game asks you to use your knowledge of the hotel and its guests to pin the culprit before police arrive and arrest the wrong suspect.
It’s a fresh concept, enough so that I bought the game moments after hearing about it, and for the most part, it delivers on its promises. I was reminded at times of Downton Abbey, as class stratification plays a large role in the narrative structure; because you play as a maid, you have to navigate the etiquette and norms of both the upper and lower class areas of the hotel, learning how to code-switch between conversations with guests and your coworkers. I particularly appreciated how the narrative gives depth and agency to its marginalized characters. As you investigate the murder, you can partner with one of two coworkers, and depending on who you choose, their side stories carefully explore themes around mental illness and queer identity in ways that humanize those characters and avoid tokenization.
My main qualm with this game revolves around the conclusion and how it’s structured (mild spoilers ahead). There are several possible endings, based on what clues you find and what evidence you choose to conceal or destroy before law enforcement arrives. The game will only reveal the true culprit if you trigger the best possible ending, but it’s unlikely you’ll find this ending on your first playthrough, because of the large number of variables that could affect your outcome. It’s unclear to the player whether throwing the wrong tissue away or forgetting to close a guest’s suitcase has a strong effect on your ending, so you’re left with the choice of either sinking hours into trial-and-error…or going to Youtube and just watching the best ending (which, I’ll confess, is what I finally did).
I don’t mind esoteric puzzles or highly-specific win conditions, but if the writers were to take this route, they needed to either give the neutral endings more resolution or offer clearer signposting for the best one. As such, I left This Bed We Made on a sour note, despite a positive impression for the majority of my experience.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (Respawn Entertainment, 2023)
I don’t keep up with Star Wars as closely as I used to. The Rise of Skywalker broke me in ways previously thought impossible, and the Disney+ shows came out at a pace I wasn’t really interested in maintaining. I did watch Andor, which, as you’ve probably heard, is a masterpiece of storytelling, and I plan to keep up with Season 2 in April. But aside from that, Respawn’s Jedi series is the only other property that’s held my attention recently.
The first game, 2019’s Fallen Order, captured my heart my being a surprise 3D metroidvania, arguably more a successor to the Metroid Prime trilogy than modern action-adventures. Its focus on exploration and map discovery had me hunting down every last collectible till I reached 100% completion.
I’m happy to report that the sequel, Survivor, manages to build on Fallen Order’s successes. The exploration is impeccable, reminding me of long weekends as a kid scouring every corner of a game map. The planets are well-designed and fun to discover, though I do think the collectathon felt more bloated this time around. Combat, however, is still a mixed bag, and unlike the first game, some of the difficulty ramps felt artificial, with the game throwing wave-after-wave of enemies rather than constructing tight encounters.
I was impressed by the story’s general restraint. Aside from one forced cameo that almost feels court-mandated, the game eschews Skywalkers and fan service for a focused and small narrative about fatherhood, legacy, and what you’d sacrifice to rekindle a past that may have never existed in the first place. And praise is due to the writers for finding an uncomfortable, morally complicated ending in a universe often lacking such complexity. As tumultuous as the industry is right now, I hope Respawn gets the opportunity to cap this series off and make it a trilogy; they’ve earned my trust, and the conclusion suggests there’s much room left to explore in this iteration of a galaxy far, far away.