Lights, Camera...

Memories brought back by hidden records. A Mystery & Suspense story set in Shimane prefecture.

"Root Film"

First game review of the year! I played this one near the end of last year, and it was perhaps the mystery game I played last year that I enjoyed best overall in 2020, but it'll have to wait until December to appear on The List.

After winning an award at the Asia Movie Competition, people in the industry started looking at Yagumo "Max" Rintarou as a rising star in the field of visual media. That's why his small film company (comprised of himself, his assistant/editor Magari and camera operator Kanade) is hired by Shimane TV for a special project: a mystery television drama set in the prefecture of Shimane. Three directors are asked to each film their own feature-length drama, and the idea is to have these three works compete with each other. Yagumo is the youngest of the three directors, but as this is his first big project, he's eager to make a success of the show. Apparently, a detective drama set in Shimane had already been in production ten years ago, but due to unknown reasons the project was put on indefinite hold and there are even some rumors that the whole thing is cursed, making some people nervous about the new project. Yagumo becomes very interested in the project that was cancelled ten years ago and the footage they had already finished by the time filming was stopped, but is also busy with coming up with ideas for his own mystery drama: while he will be working with a scenario writer, he needs to come up with a basic plot himself, so he, his team and the upcoming actress Hitoha who will be starring in Yagumo's film travel to the famous spots in Shimane to scout locations and gain inspiration of the story. But while they're scouting locations across Shimane, the team always seems to get involved with murder mysteries themselves in the 2020 video game Root Film (Switch/PS4).

Four years ago, I reviewed the game √Letter (Root Letter), the first game in the Kadokawa Game Mystery series. The concept behind this new game series was originally that it would highlight the Shimane Prefecture as a touristic spot by showing off real-life locations and culture, and the series would also feature a so-called star system, where characters are treated like "actors" in live-action productions: in √Letter for example, the pivotal character Fumino Aya was "played" by the fictional actress AYA, and the idea was that AYA would also be cast in different roles in subsequent Kadokawa Game Mystery titles. √Letter ultimately ended up as a work that disappointed me as a game, even if there were touching parts to be found there. The game also dropped dramatically in price very quickly after release, even though I bought it on release at full price, so when Root Film was announced as the second game in the Kadokawa Game Mystery series, you can understand I was a bit hesitant. Even when more details of the game were revealed slowly, like that the game would be a 'normal' murder mystery adventure game this time, and that the new director/writer was Kouno Hifumi (best known as the creator of the Clock Tower horror games, but also of the Mikagura Shoujo Tantei Dan mystery series), I still decided to not get this game at release and wait for some kind of discount. So I finally got to play it six months late and... I have to admit, I really wouldn't have minded it if I had bought this game at full price on release, because I thoroughly enjoyed it as a mystery adventure. 

Interestingly, they seemed to have abandoned the idea of using a star system with "actors" for this series, so ultimately, Root Film has next to nothing to do with √Letter save for the setting of the Shimane Prefecture and one re-used BGM track. Heck, this game even abandons the idea of having different story routes with different endings, (which is part of the reason why these games have "Root" (Route) in the title), instead opting for a linear experience. But that did allow Kouno to come up with a completely unrelated mystery plot and brand-new characters, and it's exactly those elements that make Root Film a much better experience than √Letter.

Looking at the game at a mechanical level, there's nothing that stands out in Root Film: you move from one location to another (often real locations in various popular tourist destinations in Shimane), talk with characters, a murder occurs, you go here and there to gain information and clues, and at the end of each episode, there's a confrontation with the culprit, where you show the evidence you gathered. Each episode is fairly linear, and collecting relevant information to solve the mystery is extremely easy: the game will literally pause and highlight the sentence in question and gives you a prompt to memorize it. You can't choose to not memorize the information and the prompt appears automatically, so basically, the game is just making sure you read this sentence, and during the final confrontation, you'll be asked to use these pieces of information in your back-and-forth with the culprit while you solve the mystery. During the confrontations, the game also makes a pre-selection of the available pieces of information, meaning you only have to pick out the right answer from at most four different options.

But despite the rather predictable and simple gameplay, I really enjoyed the mysteries presented in Root Film. While it's true that most of the time, the player will probably be able to make a fairly accurate guess as to the identity of the murderer in each episode and how it was done, the mysteries presented to the player in each episode are surprisingly well plotted, with perhaps not utterly baffling, but still clever tricks. What's even better that these stories make very good use of the major themes of this game: film and the Shimane Prefecture. Some of the episodes for example do a great job at incorporating local Shimane culture or unique geography in the murder plots (mythology, customs etc.), resulting in stories that could only have occured here, while all of them make use of the idea that Yagumo and his team are out filming and scouting locations, with for example clues hidden in the footage they film themselves. 

I also liked that the game also managed to fool me a few times with the tricks: usually, the clewing would be a bit crude, so you'd have an idea of how for example a locked room murder was committed, but the exact details would be a bit vague. But then the actual trick is revealed in the climax, and almost always it turns out the trick was far better thought out than I had expected and that this would've been even better if just the clewing in the preceding chapters had also been a bit clearer. I was genuinely pleasantly surprised with the mysteries presented in Root Film, which range from a ghost appearing suddenly on screen in an old film, to a locked room murder in an old Japanese manor, a case of spontanenous combustion inside a temple and a murder in a creepy old mansion, and none of the times, the solutions disappointed me. The connecting storyline about the project that was stopped ten years ago is perhaps more focused on the suspense angle, but on the whole, I'd say Root Film as a package offers an amusing mystery game. 

The journey of Root Film itself is not only enjoyable because of the capable plots, but also because these plots are presented in an entertaining way thanks to the characters: the banter between Yagumo, gyaru assistant Magari, the surprisingly eccentric actrice Hitoha and other recurring characters is funny, reminding of a lot of Japanese mystery dramas (there's also a lot of call-backs to familiar tropes from Japanese mystery dramas/films). The chatter of the team in Root Film make the story much more engaging to follow, as the different characters also allows the story to develop in various ways, compared to the very, very monotoneous √Letter. A few episodes in this game focus not on Yagumo and his team, but the young actress RIHO and her manager who also happen to be roaming Shimane for in preparation for the film project, and they too get involved in all kinds of murders. It's also interesting how the type of mysteries seen here are a bit different from the ones seen in the Yakumo chapters, and that really helps give Root Film some variety.

Root Film has in the end very little to do with the previous title, but that allowed it to be it's own game, and the result is absolutely positive: Root Film is admittedly a fairly short and straightforward mystery adventure game, but it still manages to be a very pleasant game with interesting mystery plots set firmly around the themes of 'film' and 'Shimane'. I was entertained from start to finish and as a a whole, I found Root Film to be far, far more enjoyable than I had initially expected based on the previous game. Looking forward to a third game if this is the trend!

Original Japanese title(s): 『Root Film　ルートフィルム』