Below the Root

Below the Root is an adventure inspired by the book series by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, set in the world of Green-sky, where a community living high in the crowns of giant trees rejects violence and tries to maintain peace, while a mysterious, exiled group called the Erdlings survives beneath the roots of the trees. The player alternately controls a group of child characters, each with different abilities, moving through locations among the branches and underground, collecting items and solving puzzles needed to uncover an underground conspiracy threatening Green-sky's fragile peace. Some characters can also levitate between the branches using an ability called shan, which sets the game apart from the ordinary on-foot exploration typical of other adventures of the time.

On the Atari 8-bit, the game combines simple graphics of individual locations with text descriptions and a menu of commands, thereby combining elements of the classic text adventure with a visual adventure. Switching between characters with different abilities was an unusual feature at the time of release and forced the player to think about which character best suited a given situation and how to combine the individual abilities. The peaceful tone of the story and the absence of open violence matched the literary source material aimed also at younger readers, which made the game feel more approachable and gentler than many adventures of the time with darker or grittier themes.

Below the Root is remembered today more as a curiosity and an example of a sensitive adaptation of a literary license into a computer game than as a commercial phenomenon or genre milestone. Still, it shows how diversely the adventure genre took shape in the mid-1980s — from dark dungeons to pacifist stories about children seeking balance between the world above in the treetops and below among the roots. For collectors and fans of the Atari 8-bit library, it remains an interesting and unusual departure from typical fantasy clichés.

Why play it: For collectors and fans of unusual adventures, Below the Root is an interesting departure from fantasy clichés thanks to its sensitive adaptation of the literary source and its pacifist story.