While not all of its ambitions are executed with crystal clear success, “Root Double” knew to draw a line somewhere and it is satisfyingly complete tale for its constraint. With a strong, tension filled opening sucking you into the mysteries of its plot and good emotional payoffs at the end for its likable cast, the structural weaknesses are easy to forgive.
The setup of this Adventure title is camped firmly in the framework of the “escape room” subgenre anyone who’s played Danganronpa or the Zero Escape series would be familiar with. A group of people all with very different circumstances one day find themselves stuck in dangerous place with the near impossible task of escaping—all while clashing personalities and growing suspicions complicate their ability to work together.
It’s a genre that balances many elements—tension, mystery, character writing—and it succeeds in delivering on these elements just not consistently.
The tension starts high and well paced, but then it will take too long of a break or interrupt at an odd time around the middle to late parts of the story. Never so badly that it can’t recover, but enough that you’re aware it happened.
The questions the story poses are often fairly small and predictable, but in their sheer number it’s still compelling to see how they all fit together into one whole.
The character writing is not often subtle, but there’s still a kind of gracefulness in its openness. There’s a way in which it plays obvious sleights of hand and yet the challenge isn’t to guess what trick it hid. The challenge is to continue trusting that somewhere behind the curtain is a detail that will make things turn out the way you hope they will.
What this story does do consistently well, is detail. Detail in the setting. Detail in the characters. Detail in the action. Detail in the mystery. By the end of it I couldn’t think of one interesting plot thread that wasn’t resolved in a satisfying way or any plot convenience so contrived it breaks the illusion.
If you comb through with the intent to find them, you likely will. But even history is subject to scrutiny. The point here is that for whatever Root Double lacks in plating and portion size control, the narrative is still a satisfying dish from a competent chef.
Quite unfortunately, the singular interactive element is decidedly the weakest ingredient despite having the most promise. Rather than picking from a set of clear-cut text responses at the games branch points, the act of picking itself is a small puzzle through the “Senses Sympathy System” where you set sliders for each relevant character to the branch to determine… your general positive/negative impression of them? The game is rather vague about it, but your intuition is rarely far off.
The decisions made will generally favor the viewpoint of the characters whose setting is High and disfavor the view of whoever is Low. However, this often results in two problems: one, a lot of the best decisions to make for the Grand Ending is to just put everyone high; two, when this isn’t the case the lack of definition on what it means makes it feel inconsistent.
Additionally, there are 9 possible values for each slider, but in all put a very small handful of MANY decisions made over the game, the game is only checking LOW/MEDIUM/HIGH. And it’s frankly too abstract to reason with it besides trial and error.
I tried the first route of the game without a guide rather excited to figure it out, but by the end of that (which is only a third of the game) the structure of the story and the amount of experimentation needed just felt at odds.
The graduated selections promise a lot of small variations. But, realistically it just doesn’t fit with how long the story is, how many correct decisions need to be made to reach the true end, and how little time a reader can reasonably be expected to spend on any one decision. There are ultimately only really 2-3 story changes possible per decision and most are very minor. Though, to its credit, it does a good job of telling the player how important each one is.
This isn’t really a problem unique to Root Double, however, so while disappointing, I wouldn’t turn away from it for that. I imagine few people would even read through a very popular title like Steins;Gate without a guide for its obscure decision making system.
I very much would recommend Root Double to anyone looking to get an escape room drama fix. It’s more grounded and less pessimistic than many of its peers, which I’m personally a fan of, but there’s also plenty of near-future sci-fi thrills for those who enjoy that. It’s a bit more of a time commitment than it perhaps should have been, so be prepared to do some skimming depending on how well you’re following the plot. But, ultimately, I think its worth it in the end.
The setup of this Adventure title is camped firmly in the framework of the “escape room” subgenre anyone who’s played Danganronpa or the Zero Escape series would be familiar with. A group of people all with very different circumstances one day find themselves stuck in dangerous place with the near impossible task of escaping—all while clashing personalities and growing suspicions complicate their ability to work together.
It’s a genre that balances many elements—tension, mystery, character writing—and it succeeds in delivering on these elements just not consistently.
The tension starts high and well paced, but then it will take too long of a break or interrupt at an odd time around the middle to late parts of the story. Never so badly that it can’t recover, but enough that you’re aware it happened.
The questions the story poses are often fairly small and predictable, but in their sheer number it’s still compelling to see how they all fit together into one whole.
The character writing is not often subtle, but there’s still a kind of gracefulness in its openness. There’s a way in which it plays obvious sleights of hand and yet the challenge isn’t to guess what trick it hid. The challenge is to continue trusting that somewhere behind the curtain is a detail that will make things turn out the way you hope they will.
What this story does do consistently well, is detail. Detail in the setting. Detail in the characters. Detail in the action. Detail in the mystery. By the end of it I couldn’t think of one interesting plot thread that wasn’t resolved in a satisfying way or any plot convenience so contrived it breaks the illusion.
If you comb through with the intent to find them, you likely will. But even history is subject to scrutiny. The point here is that for whatever Root Double lacks in plating and portion size control, the narrative is still a satisfying dish from a competent chef.
Quite unfortunately, the singular interactive element is decidedly the weakest ingredient despite having the most promise. Rather than picking from a set of clear-cut text responses at the games branch points, the act of picking itself is a small puzzle through the “Senses Sympathy System” where you set sliders for each relevant character to the branch to determine… your general positive/negative impression of them? The game is rather vague about it, but your intuition is rarely far off.
The decisions made will generally favor the viewpoint of the characters whose setting is High and disfavor the view of whoever is Low. However, this often results in two problems: one, a lot of the best decisions to make for the Grand Ending is to just put everyone high; two, when this isn’t the case the lack of definition on what it means makes it feel inconsistent.
Additionally, there are 9 possible values for each slider, but in all put a very small handful of MANY decisions made over the game, the game is only checking LOW/MEDIUM/HIGH. And it’s frankly too abstract to reason with it besides trial and error.
I tried the first route of the game without a guide rather excited to figure it out, but by the end of that (which is only a third of the game) the structure of the story and the amount of experimentation needed just felt at odds.
The graduated selections promise a lot of small variations. But, realistically it just doesn’t fit with how long the story is, how many correct decisions need to be made to reach the true end, and how little time a reader can reasonably be expected to spend on any one decision. There are ultimately only really 2-3 story changes possible per decision and most are very minor. Though, to its credit, it does a good job of telling the player how important each one is.
This isn’t really a problem unique to Root Double, however, so while disappointing, I wouldn’t turn away from it for that. I imagine few people would even read through a very popular title like Steins;Gate without a guide for its obscure decision making system.
I very much would recommend Root Double to anyone looking to get an escape room drama fix. It’s more grounded and less pessimistic than many of its peers, which I’m personally a fan of, but there’s also plenty of near-future sci-fi thrills for those who enjoy that. It’s a bit more of a time commitment than it perhaps should have been, so be prepared to do some skimming depending on how well you’re following the plot. But, ultimately, I think its worth it in the end.