Root Letter

Root Letter starts unassumingly: the hero finds, after many years, letters from a girl he used to correspond with as a student, and the last of them contains a confession to murder. He sets out to find her in Shimane Prefecture, only to discover that no one by that name ever lived at the given address, and the school she supposedly attended has no record of her. The game develops as a search for a person who, according to every official record, doesn't exist, and the player gradually visits former classmates, confronts them with the contents of the letters, and pieces together what happened in that class years ago.

Gameplay combines reading with classic adventure-game legwork. Locations are picked on a map, details are examined on the spot, and in conversations you choose which word or object to bring up to get a witness talking. The investigative sections take the form of confrontations, where you must pick the one piece of evidence, out of everything gathered so far, that breaks through an excuse. The game offers several distinct endings depending on how the player steers the conversations, and some of them change the meaning of the whole story surprisingly dramatically. The pace is slower, calmer, and rests on small interpersonal revelations. There's also a collection of letters you can return to at any time and reread with what you've since learned, which gradually changes their meaning, and the map fills in with locations that only open up after a correctly steered conversation.

Visually the title stands out by using edited photographs of real locations in Shimane as backgrounds, over which drawn characters move. On the PlayStation Vita's display, the combination of real landscape and illustration feels unusual and adds a lot to the sense of searching for a real person in a real place. The music is nostalgic, heavily acoustic, and restrained. Reviews praised the atmosphere, the visual approach, and the mystery itself, with reservations about some endings whose sharp genre swerve breaks with the tone of the rest of the game. Today Root Letter is a pleasant, travelogue-flavored detective story for players who want to investigate without rushing.