I’m kind of a fan of Eldritch horrors.
You might have been able to guess this by my putting Cultist Simulator second in my top ten games (despite having several complaints about the game as well). Or my almost 200 hours in that game. Or my dedicated shelf of Lovecraftian board games. Or my impressions of this game’s demo from almost a year ago. I might not be the most well-read in the Lovecraftian mythos, but I’ve read enough to confidently say that Roots Devour absolutely nails the feeling of there being something otherworldly and unknowable stalking humans like prey, something that gets more dangerous just by the humans knowing it’s there and that can drive them to madness with any interaction… and it’s not just because of the tentacles. (I think I mentioned those before. They still don’t have blood. (Sorry, Mother.))
The Dunwich Forest Horror
The start of the game hasn’t changed much since I played the demo last March. A cult in a remote part of the forest performed a ritual that went horribly right and spawned a baby Eldritch abomination—you. They make the panicked exclamations that you would expect of humans in this situation; unfortunately, the way the dialogue in this and some other parts of the game overlaps and automatically advances means you can’t read everything, but you get the gist of it. The gist being “oh shit, what have we done, we’re all going to die.”
After happily slaughtering the humans who brought you into the world, it’s time to start exploring. With nothing but blood for fuel, you start spreading your… well, your roots across the land. (Root is also your name, according to some flavor text.) After a brief tutorial, you meet the main NPC ally who will be directing you through the game’s plot and waiting for you at the Altar anytime you return. She kindly tells you about how you’re doing this for Mother—after she tricks you into taking a, shall we say, “shortcut” back to the Altar, but hey, what are older sisters for?
The game becomes hard to categorize at this point, because the way the Altar works feels like it belongs to something roguelike, but this game is decidedly not that. The maps are clearly designed with meticulous care, loaded with things to chase after and clues to pick up and lots and lots of stuff. There’s so much to unlock that even after finishing the game’s story I had dozens of nodes at the Altar still locked, including omens I had yet to complete and entire paths that I had yet to figure out how to access. You could easily spend dozens of hours finding every nook and cranny the creators have hidden in these levels. And once you spent the blood you got from doing so, you’d probably find a new mutation of a creature with a mechanic you didn’t know about.
The Shadow over Innsmouth the Deep Swamp
As you would expect, the starting area—the forest—doesn’t have any environmental mechanics. Those get introduced in Act II, in the Deep Swamp. And with them, the game introduces what is both one of its greatest strengths and an element that was occasionally frustrating: There are some things in the game you’ll only know once you see them happen.
At points in the Deep Swamp, I really worried that it would go too far, that I would end up stuck, like I used to be in Cultist Simulator before I caved and started looking at the wiki for everything. Roots Devour dances along that line of being too cryptic and making you sacrifice a lot of time (and a lot of blood) to figure things out through trial and error. It’s sometimes not clear, for example, whether a space is passable or not. The only consistent way to know is to try to stretch your roots through it and see if the game tells you the spreading of roots is hindered. And while it tells you about cards and expansion packs, the exact how and why of those cards isn’t clear until you use a few dozen of them.
But the way the game half-hides information also makes it really exciting when you do find the key to something you were confused about. (Those mushrooms in the swamp that look to be impassable? There’s a way to get rid of them. And it makes perfect intuitive sense once you find it.)
I will say that some of the cryptic-ness of the game, while I was playing it for this review, was because there was some text that was showing in Chinese. I say “was” because each day I logged in to continue playing the game I saw some of those lines being updated to show in English, so it looks like the devs are actively working on fixing it. I did see at least one left when I finished the game, though, so be aware. Thankfully, you can mostly figure out what that text says by playing the game. And for any text displaying in English, you can click on any words with fancy formatting to see a summary of what they mean. Even the “little surprise” on an animal you’ll meet later will tell you what the surprise is if you click on it. That helps a lot to alleviate the frustration while you figure things out.
At the Mountains of Madness…
…Actually, it’s still the mountains of madness.
I almost figured out how to classify and describe this game. And then Act II concluded and Act III started and I realized I had underestimated the single greatest strength of this game: the story.
I don’t mean your story as Root. I mean the story of the humans who have the misfortune to stumble across your roots, or have something you want, or generally get on Mother’s bad side. Because this is an Eldritch horror story, just being told from the perspective of the Eldritch horror; and just like in Lovecraft’s tales, there are some hapless humans who have accidentally ended up as part of the story and would like to leave now, please.
The ending of the Deep Swamp arc felt like an alternate version of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and I mean that as a good thing. And that momentum carried right into the Snow Mountain arc, which I really wish I could talk about without spoilers but I really, really can’t. I’ll just say that I’m pretty sure some of what happened, only happened because of the choices I made in Deep Swamp. I don’t know exactly how much variation there is in the story based on your choices, but there are two decisions I made that I’m positive had an impact, and I badly want to know how much impact that was.
The Call of Cthulhu Mother
I really only have one major complaint about this game, and I hope the developers address it in the future. This game badly needs a “save and quit” option in the menu.
This is not a short game. If you only spend 30-60 minutes on a level past the tutorial, it’s probably because something went horribly wrong. I was easily spending 4-5 hours on the map at a time and coming back with 5000+ units of blood to give to Mother. You unlock a lot of territory over those hours, and if you have to stop and quit the game at any point, when you restart the game you’ll be back at the Altar, and next time you’re on the map you’ll have to unlock it all over again. (I suspect that the “Root Remains” cards that appear in later levels might be based on what you had unlocked in your previous exploration, but I haven’t been able to confirm that.) This is not a game to pick up when you only have an hour or so to play, at least not when you have story left to do. You’ll spend the whole hour just getting to the area where the next story event unlocks.
That said, I honestly didn’t feel those hours going by while I was playing the game. (My eyes did, but I need new glasses, that’s not the game’s fault.) I was too invested in figuring out how to get to those parts of the map that I could see glimpses of, in the resource allocation, the risk-reward of expansion packs, the thrill of finding slivers and crumbs of story that I knew would tie into something bigger if I could only find it. That excitement means a lot. This game’s story and loop are both designed with love, care, and no small amount of skill, enough to carry it through what for me were marathon game sessions. Enough that when I saw that my save was erased with the full release, my first thought might have been “Wait what?” but my second thought was “Wait this is perfect now I have an excuse to find out what happens if I don’t kill—”
Thank you to Gamecores for the review code. You can find Seasoned Gaming’s review policy here.
