TR-49 Review – Scholarly Curiosity Meets Reality-Bending Fiction

TR-49 Review

There’s nothing better than a mug of hot chocolate and a night in with inkle’s new narrative deduction game, TR-49, on a frosty January evening. You’ll feel even cozier because you’re not Abbi, who must navigate a derelict basement filled with vacuum tubes and bulky transistors to access a mysterious WWII-era computer.

TR-49’s players are tasked with decoding a mystery spread across the dozens of books and documents that have been fed into the machine over the past 50 years. As players unlock the machine’s mysteries, an audio drama unfolds between the player character, Abbi, and the mysterious man helping her learn the machine’s secrets.

 

The machine’s creators, Cecil Caulderly and Beatrice Dooler, turned it into far more than the average archive. It synthesizes and reconstructs information it’s fed as though it lives and breathes, too. If the machine tells you something, it’s true — and it will tell you some pretty crazy things.

Faulty Starts

I almost missed out on TR-49’s reality-bending mysteries. The first time I opened the game, I instantly turned it off— only to repeat the process the next time I logged on. The first swarm of text was just so overwhelming!

It’s worth pushing past that feeling. The third time was the charm that swept me up in TR-49’s mystery. Those false starts came from the initial shock of thinking I would have to decode the paragraphs that became more illegible as the seconds passed — turns out that feature is just there for aesthetic value. I just needed to click the letters and numbers marked in glowing red text. Sounds obvious, in hindsight.

Players’ main goal is matching the four-digit codes used to classify each entry to the title of the book it belongs to. Uncovering these elements leads players deeper into the strange spiritualism of these authors’ often philosophical writings.

Indeed, learning that inkle was founded by two Cambridge game developers came as no surprise. Discovering TR-49’s secrets demands an almost scholarly curiosity.

Jot That Down

If everything is laid out for players, it’s not a detective game — it’s an adventure game with a mystery aesthetic. Recent titles like Return of the Obra Dinn, Blue Prince, and Case of the Golden Idol have awoken a hunger for the other kind: games that make you use your noggin instead of pretending to.

TR-49 has done an excellent job balancing the “notebook factor.” This is figuring out how to guide players to the next point without requiring that players whip out a notebook, or removing the player’s need to use their own deduction skills.

Players can access a folder with drawings and details for each of the authors whose work Abby rifles through. Each comes with a list of relevant entries; there’s also a list of all entries where all players can match crucial codes with their texts.

The little red dots indicating there were secrets in specific entries became my lifeline. When matching, TR-49 is perhaps too kind by telegraphing wrong matchups with Abbi’s incredulous voice. Perhaps telling audiences that their guess was correct in groups — a la Obra Dinn or The Roottrees are Dead — would have kept the excitement higher.

These quality-of-life measures aren’t the primary reason I had fewer euphoric aha! moments playing TR-49 than with its predecessors. I suspect that matching people with their names is just more exciting than matching codes with their documents. Even after becoming invested in the game’s overarching narrative, TR-49 hasn’t quite married its most impactful gameplay discoveries with its emotional elements.

Early on, I hit the wrong letter-number combo and suddenly got taken to a new letter. This set me on a disorderly path to unraveling the game’s secrets. It didn’t matter much. I righted my path in the end, still hardly scratching the surface of TR-49’s plentiful easter eggs.

The credits taught me that I wasn’t nearly curious enough about the breadth of classic novels that had been inputted into the machine — although perhaps it’s fine not to stop and smell the roses.

After all, the very world is at stake.

Can You Repeat That?

Conversation between Abbi and her guide, Liam, illustrates a world that is sick with fascism and death. The machine holds the key to saving it.

Strange things happen in this world. Or, as TR-49’s fictional French writer Quentin Lembarchant once said: “The alteration of conscious thought by unconscious means can affect meaningful unnegated change.” Don’t worry, he’s brought up right at the beginning — and he makes a great point.

The audio drama portion of this story doesn’t do the same. The machine’s creators, Cecil and Beatrice, succeed as TR-49’s most charming characters from their log entries. Because I had to press the audio button to let Abbi speak every time, the dialogue constantly forced me away from the game’s meatiest mechanical moments — only to further distract me with plot information I couldn’t afford to miss.

The acting itself was great, but that’s no surprise with talent like Phillipe Bosher (Baldur’s Gate 3, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Rebekah McLoughlin (The SCP Archives, Eternal Threads) and Paul Warren (Viewfinder, The Seance of Blake Manor).

Narrative (Deduction)

TR-49’s biggest flaw comes back to that alienating opening text. Typical for a narrative deduction title, TR-49’s final moments were unavoidably tedious. It takes time and total clarity to find the last pages that unlock the game’s ending. It’s unfortunate, then, that the longer I spent between each solved clue, the more the text degraded on certain entries. This seemed to specifically apply to the personal logs that I most needed to progress.

Squinting through shifting text to reread an entry that was normal an hour ago is unpleasant and infuriating. It’s uncharacteristically punitive in a game otherwise built to understand the player. It’s also hostile in a very real accessibility sense. My boyfriend has dyslexia, which pushed the text into genuine illegibility for him.

This issue nearly forced me out of finishing the game. I loved the ending, so I’m glad I pushed through. I just wish the game’s final hours hadn’t left a bad taste in my mouth.

Hopefully, this issue can be fixed. Otherwise, TR-49 is a great dose of fun for narrative deduction fanatics like myself. At its height, TR-49 succeeds at making every player feel like its mystery is their very own to solve. It takes talent to distort reality like that.

***PC code was provided by the publisher***