Review: A Case of Fraud
Today we’re looking at a game inspired by a game inspired by what is probably my favourite game of all time (Return of the Obra Dinn).
A Case of Fraud has sort of come out of nowhere for me: I’ve made a habit of the somewhat fruitless task of scrolling through the ‘popular upcoming releases’ on Steam once a week; typically the only games which show up that I’d be interested in reviewing are ones that I was already aware of, but occasionally something appears that catches my eye. With A Case of Fraud, that was the very “Roottrees are Dead”-like screenshot that occupies the first slot on its Steam page.
Still, I have to admit that I wasn’t immediately convinced – it was clear exactly what type of game this was, but I’d not heard a single thing about it, and for me, the game’s capsule art and trailer didn’t inspire a huge amount of confidence. I figured that it’s relatively easy to make something that looks like Roottrees, but what made that game special wasn’t really that core mechanic of filling in the family tree, but the deduction and reasoning you had to use in order to do that; the sifting through webpages and documents to find clues for people’s identities.
Perhaps if the market gets inundated with them this will change, but right now there’s no limit to the amount of good deduce-em-ups I could play, particularly Roottrees-likes — but I don’t think they’re easy to make. Things like coding and art very much aside, my head starts hurting when I try to think of how you’d even begin to go about designing one of these in a way that is both coherent and challenging; where the answers are hidden in ways that are interesting, but not buried so deep that the game becomes frustrating, or its story impossible to follow.
For better or worse, it was only once the many many positive Steam reviews started coming in – at time of writing it’s at 100% positive with 76 reviews – that I really sat up and paid attention to A Case of Fraud and gave it the chance it deserved.
Image: Hesperus Games
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Developer: Hesperus Games
Publisher: Hesperus Games
Release: 10 November 2025
Retail Price (Steam): 8,79€/$8.99/£7.49
In A Case of Fraud players find themselves as a new recruit at the ‘Debenham Detection’ agency, who’ve recently been hired to investigate a missing persons case: that of Christine Pelham, the CEO of a tech startup building an app to help people understand their pets, The police think she’s taken her dog and left town: her family believe otherwise, and it’s up to you to figure out who’s correct.
To do that, you need to establish more information about the people surrounding her: in the game’s inspiration, The Roottrees are Dead, you were building up a family tree: here it’s the company’s organisation chart. It’s largely the same concept though: find their first name, surname, and a picture of them. Oh, and some of them are pets.
It’s been a little while since I played Roottrees, but I think the contemporary setting in A Case of Fraud led to me having significantly stronger feeling towards its characters – where in Roottrees you often feel like an archivist going through history that you’re long-since detached from, here I found myself forming opinions on people over relatively innocuous things.
Take for example the mild resentment I felt for the slob who got coffee stains on their business cards and had poorer sales figures than junior members of their department, or the pity I felt for some poor bastard called Peter having to work 80-hour weeks in an awful corporate job. He looks like he’s probably on the verge of having some sort of psychotic breakdown: probably one step away from handing in his notice and packing it all in to instead review indie games on the internet or something, because God help him if he has to work another day in that God-forsaken environment, but hey, at least this Peter’s been acknowledged as ‘Employee of the Month,’ like, one time, at least THIS Peter probably got paid for that overtime, at least THIS Peter’s CEO probably got themselves—
Image: Hesperus Games / IndieLoupe.com - The Aforementioned Peter
Maybe enough on Peter. Actually, during your investigation you’ll realise that the CEO here in A Case of Fraud appears entirely undeserving of any fate that might’ve befallen her: her worst transgression seems to be being married to a man who looks a little bit too much like Russell Brand. Other characters are a little more unsavoury, but I’ll let you discover which for yourself.
One key difference between The Roottrees are Dead and A Case of Fraud is that you don’t need to dig for evidence as much here as you do in the former: once you solve a target number of people, you’ll be provided with all the files you need to keep going, whereas a lot of the evidence in Roottrees came from searching through various databases and websites. There’s pros and cons of either approach, but I think sometimes in Roottrees there’s a sort of faux-difficulty where you spend a considerable amount of time struggling to figure out the correct search term – and use it in the correct place – in order to unlock a vital piece of evidence. Here in A Case of Fraud, you know you’ve got everything you need and can just crack on with your deductions, which I think has a wider appeal, despite sacrificing a little depth. There’s people in my life I’ve already recommended A Case of Fraud to who I think might get fed up with Roottrees, even with their other similarities. This feels that tiny bit more enjoyable and a little less like work.
At risk of sounding like a complete arse, I think with this very specific subgenre I tend towards the more extreme end of what would be my ‘ideal’ difficulty – effectively I’m a masochist who wants to struggle over a piece of evidence for half an hour, which I recognise is not most people’s idea of fun. There’s, thankfully, not much of that here at all: the very final piece of the very final puzzle did cause a few problems for me; I ended up getting it right but couldn’t find evidence that I felt proved it was the correct solution. My answer made the most sense, but there was – at least in my mind – another plausible explanation, and I spent a good amount of time trying to find something to confirm one theory or the other. Take that with a pinch of salt: I could’ve missed something, and perhaps I was just trying too hard to look for a twist that wasn’t there, so it was a little unfortunate that the only time it happened was with my last actions of the game.
Image: Hesperus Games
I do want to quickly touch on the art. I guess I hinted earlier that, upon first impression, I didn’t really have any strong feelings about it one way or the other, but I wanted to make the point that it’s a lot more important in this sort of game that it’s legible rather than tremendously attractive. A problem the original itch.io version of Roottrees had – on account of its AI-generated art (which we’re not going to get into here, but which I’ve made my opinions of pretty clear) – was that players were expected to be able to recognise that two pictures showed the same person when they… didn’t. That’s a more extreme example, but even in games untouched by the taint of AI I can think of situations where an admittedly more impressive art style has meant I’ve missed things that I was supposed to notice – it’s a different genre, but most recently I can think of an instance in The Drifter where I kept missing an item critical to advancing in that story, and I’m fairly sure it happened once or twice in the far-more-similar The Case of the Golden Idol.
In A Case of Fraud there wasn’t a single instance of something like that happening– there’s even an accessibility option to toggle images to plain text, but I never needed to use it as everything was already very well-considered and clear. One minor quibble was that I did occasionally find myself wanting a way to ‘grey out’ or otherwise mark the documents that I was certain I was done with: there’s an intuitive click-and-drag system that allows players to rearrange them such that they can push items they’re less interested in down to the bottom, but it would’ve been nice to be able to do get them even further out of the way. Were there significantly more documents to get through I could see it having been more of a problem, but things are compartmentalised just enough that it only caused a minor inconvenience.
Image: Hesperus Games
It’s difficult not to draw further comparisons with The Roottrees are Dead when giving a final verdict on A Case of Fraud. I’d argue that, all things considered, it’s pretty much on a par with the original case in Roottrees, though without reaching the heights of the Rootttreemania case, which I adored. For people who’ve played neither and are unsure if they’d like the genre, I’d actually be inclined to suggest that they play A Case of Fraud first: as I said earlier, it feels a little less like work than Roottrees did: but I guess that some people do prefer their game to feel like work.
Either way, A Case of Fraud is an excellent addition to the genre and one I’d recommend to both fans and newcomers. It is awarded an 8/10 by IndieLoupe.com.
The reviewed product was provided by the developer.
