Roots Devour is a stylish game, there’s no denying that. How much fruit this tree bears will be very dependent on how well you gel with that style though.
Starting at the basics, Rewinding Games describe Roots Devour as a “strategic exploration” game. Using your mouse (with WASD to pan), you connect vines from your main body to a series of cards to beat back the fog of war and explore the map. The main “strategy” involved here is the order you connect the nodes, and later on the way you use your card deck to add new nodes, so you can keep exploring without running out of the dual resources of blood and water.
You spend blood to draw cards from your deck and to expand your roots (to a point). You can gain blood by connecting to creature nodes to drain and kill them. This is the essential cycle your exploration will take. There are, of course, compilations. These range from larger creatures that must be digested first, to hard vegetation that needs to be broken down, or rocks you need to find cracks in. All the while your influence spreads from your base body and you start to unravel a story across each of the levels.
This is where the aforementioned style comes into play. Apart from a couple of screens (which I’ll get into later) the entire game is played out on the same board. Cutscenes display characters as node cards, which move around the map and change state, using the exact same animations as would happen based on in-game actions. A pessimist may call this lazy, but I honestly find it rather refreshing. I love a pretty cutscene, but it can be very immersion breaking to suddenly swap presentation styles between gameplay and story beats, and I find the consistency to be engrossing and charming. I am aware, however, that this is probably because I appreciate the dark colour scheme, contrasting art, and general grungy gothic atmosphere the game generates. If you weren’t a Hot Topic teen, your mileage may very much vary. The story itself is solid. Touches of Eldritch flavour and the like are dotted throughout and while it’s nothing groundbreaking, I certainly wasn’t bored either.
Back to the gameplay though. Water is a more finite resource, and this is where the other section of the game comes into play. If you run out of water, you die. Upon death or “return”, you come back to a hub world where you can spend blood and other currencies in order to unlock new abilities and generally improve your evil plant powers. You can also use equipment to modify the runs on a point-spend system to play about with different “builds”. It’s all very “rougelike”.
Now, I’m not the kind of person who needs a game to explain every single element through a lengthy conversation with a floating fairy, but please bear in mind that beyond the very basic elements, most of your learning about the more intricate interactions and mechanics will be done through trial-and-error or clicking on every single node you see and reading their description, and then also hovering over the keywords in each description to see what they mean. I’m sure if I played this for tens of hours, these kinds of things would start to feel intrinsic and familiar but at this time in my review (around 3-4 hours in), I feel like I’m playing a new board game for the first time and I need a manual open next to me constantly.
Just as a note, I played a pre-release version of Roots Devour (0.1.4.2.1 to be exact), so the game very much warned me the final version may be tidier than the one I was playing. However, I am pleased to say I encountered very few glitches or errors even in this early build.
Overall, I’d describe it as more of a narrative game than a strategy game. But, if the description of the general vibe of the game has piqued your interest even a bit, it might be worth a shot for you!
Roots Devour was reviewed on Steam using a pre-release code.
