TR-49 review

It’s set entirely in a damp crypt. All you do is jam four-digit codes into a machine. It’s got a title only slightly more marketable than 'Mindseye 2: The Randy Pitchford Cut’. And it’s so good that you’re honestly lucky I’m not currently throwing a Steam Deck at you and forcing you to play it.

If those stakes sound severe, they’ve got nothing on what poor Abbi is going through. She’s the unfortunate protagonist of TR-49, stuck in the underbelly of a cathedral with nothing but a mysterious machine for company. At least she’s got it easier than William, the man upstairs keeping watch while also offering occasional advice. Though he’s far more frequently offering pleas to hurry up and use the machine before they get caught by the murderers hunting them down.

Sorry to sideline your boring problems, William, but what a machine! I visited Bletchley Park on a school trip once and got bored, ungrateful millenial cretin that I am. Fortunately, Inkle got inspired instead and has crafted something delightfully esoteric. It’s like a code breaker, library archive, record player, and super-satisfying lever pull rolled into one.

The machine is full of books that have been ‘fed’ into it by its eccentric inventor. Your initial goal is to find a specific book. Unfortunately, just having the book title won’t help you much. You can only search via a four-character keypad, always consisting of two letters and two numbers, which is why they called the game TR-49 (and presumably made their marketing team burst into tears in the process).

Authors have been uploaded by their initials and the year the work was published. So if someone uploaded this review into the machine you’d find it under AS-26. But say the uploader left a note underneath saying “not as bizarre as her positive review of that Pac-Man Metroidvania the year before”. That clue would take you to AS-25 where you’d learn the terrifying truth of how high I overscored Shadow Labyrinth, and perhaps more clues within that.

This is how you track down TR-49’s many, many, many secrets, except puzzles quickly get far tougher. Names can change, publications cease for years due to outside events, and sometimes you even seem to be required to put four letter words into the machine. But that can’t be possible. Can it?

There’s a reason EA doesn't spend millions annually making games where you play as a stressed library archivist, and so far this might sound like a drier experience than eating unbuttered toast in the Sahara. The game avoids this by keeping the tension high. You’re never not aware that you could be discovered by people who want to kill you at any moment.

Then there’s the book extracts you’re sifting through. They’re fun, but the wonderfully bitchy conflicts between the various writers is even better. Writing what you know, Inkle? Each log entry in the machine consists of a paragraph from the uploaded book and some commentary from whoever uploaded it. I particularly enjoyed the series of sci-fi novels that disappear so far up their own arse they could knock out the author’s teeth. The academic journal you’ll find in here writes such devastating takedowns of some of the books (“a symphony of disgrace”) that they’d likely give this game a five, and my review a -90.

When you first discover a log entry, however, you’ll only be able to read the commentary from the person who fed it in. The extract itself is just a useless pile of jumbled-up letters until you match the correct book title with the log entry code. Get it right and Abbi will say the title triumphantly to let you know you’ve got a match. Satisfying, but a little too easy to cheat.

Guessing game

Ever since Obra Dinn revolutionized the detective game, lots of contemporaries have ‘borrowed’ its brilliant system wherein you don’t know if you’re right about something until you’ve put three correct pieces of information in. This stops you from just hammering in guesses until you accidentally stumble across the solution. I was surprised, then, that Inkle has included no such guardrail here. Once I had enough codes and titles, I could easily just keep jamming them in every book title box down the list until Abbi confirmed I’d gotten a hit. “Haha!” I thought smugly “so I am smarter than Inkle!”

Obviously I am not smarter than Inkle. According to this game, I can’t even spell my own name right. Which leaves me scratching my head as to why it would let me game this system so easily. Perhaps because the developer knew it was ultimately meaningless, since I had no hope of solving the game’s true mysteries unless I properly engaged with the texts?

It’s a bit kinder than Obra Dinn and Golden Idol all round, actually, and not just because it lets me indulge my inner cheating scumbag. Look through your notes and the authors you’ve discovered have drawings attached to their files. This turns into a photo when you have found all their work that's in the machine, gently letting you know that your attention is now better spent elsewhere. In their bibliographies, there’ll also be an asterisk next to pages which still have clues for pages that you haven’t unlocked yet. It never holds your hand, but it’s great at giving you a little push in the right direction.

It took me eight hours to reach my first ending, a time that I worry will soon be discovered by the wider world to be absolutely pathetic. But no solution felt unfair and whenever I picked up on another breadcrumb trail of pages following a eureka moment, well, that feeling is basically why I play games in the first place. The writing is fantastic, even by this studio’s absurdly high standards, delivering a tense thriller with constant nasty twists. Just wait until you realise what’s causing the machine’s increasingly frequent glitches.

Audi-oh no

Voice acting is outstanding throughout, with lots of entertaining pomposity from the authors reading their extracts. Even better is the drama happening upstairs. William and Abbi start the game in terrible danger and things only get worse from there. The highlight is when someone very unpleasant indeed starts communicating with you, giving a truly sinister performance as they try to find Abbi’s location and taunt her about how her failure is inevitable. That was a fun voice to hear on Friday night when I still hadn’t solved the mystery and the review deadline was getting closer.

The only flaw with the audio is the music. I like a bit of melancholic piano and strings as much as the next miseryguts, but after several hours of it, I’m listening to ASMR videos of extra-squeaky chalkboards just for some variety. Otherwise, TR-49 is a terrific mystery machine. It was nice of the Bletchley Park folks to help win WW2, but that they inspired Inkle to make this is clearly even better.