The Archives of Trevosa are a good place to spend a few hours
The number of games is now so high, and the usefulness of search tools so low, that it’s no longer possible to conduct casual historical research. Any attempt to track the genesis of any given genre will yield only a breezy AI summary of a YouTube video on the topic that will on closer inspection have been created by somebody with an unsettling interest in phrenology, or a series of insipid best-of articles crafted exclusively to chase the final dregs of search traffic, grimly reproducing the same tired list of titles while reciting Key Search Terms like acolytes completing their rituals even as the meteorite breaks through the upper atmosphere.
I am therefore forced to rely on my own very limited experience and say that Her Story pioneered the current trend in deduction games, and The Return of the Obra Dinn set the high water mark. I nevertheless cherish The Roottrees Are Dead, which opted for a clumsy 1990s desktop as its means of discovery, a method I would still consider perfect for the form: a mix of conceptually omniscient but practically limited that’s entirely period-correct.
