Inkle’s TR-49 tasks you with recovering old passages and books that have been fed into the game’s eponymous, anomalous machine. Either by brute force or deduction, entering the right 4-digit code will take you to its corresponding entry in the TR-49. With 50 entries in total, all of which have to be named correctly, it’s quite easy to get lost or overwhelmed. As you progress through the 6-hour game, you’ll hopefully learn the patterns that this virtual world is built around.
Hidden in a long-forgotten basement of a building in Manchester sits a strange machine. A mysterious man speaking over a radio explains that I have to find a book. Said book sits inside of a WWII-era computer that I’m staring at, he explains that my mission is of the utmost importance. A key part of his message to me: “Don’t get distracted”.
I didn’t gel with anything TR-49 needed me to at first. Usually, I’m all over these types of deduction-style games, but I saw no clues the first two times I started this game, just words. Its clunky, abrasive UI was always just one step away from being smooth. The letters and numbers I must select telescopically rim the screen like teeth inside a strange, virtual mouth. Two buttons on screen strangely led me to the same menu and there’s a dedicated talk button that I never quite understood the point of.
I sat through TR-49’s intro four separate times. Each time this stranger over the radio, Liam, would warn me: You could get lost in this thing. Each time, he was dead right. Learning the language of the TR-49, with its obfuscated codes and identifiers hidden amongst its text, I started to feel an appreciation for this game that I couldn’t grasp before. In understanding this virtual library, one had consumed so many lives, I had incorporated my own.
The game’s story captured me completely from that point, melding together these ideas of spirituality, metaphysics and science. Part of the draw of TR-49 is that nothing is laid out uniformly, it’s all a web of interconnected puzzle pieces just begging to be assembled. I routinely found myself down some kind of rabbit hole, looking at entries that served no purpose other than to distract me from my task. Thankfully, the game holds an effective notebook that I had constant access to, for when I wanted to return to the proper path. Even after finding the thread I needed to pull, I would be enticed toward other paths too great to pass up.
Admittedly, this unrestricted exploration ended up ruining some of the game’s tension. Periodic reminders that try to hurry me along tend to fall flat when there’s no actual consequence for taking my time. These remarks also doubled as an incessant annoyance, frustratingly interrupting my investigations while rarely adding any value. I found relief in periods of relative silence, when Liam would leave or when I’d simply put my headphones down to focus without audible interruptions. I enjoyed the game the most when I was accompanied only with the voice in my head and the slight hum of the machine.
Inkle have crafted a complex and gripping puzzler akin to games like Return of the Obra Dinn and last year’s The Roottrees are Dead. Similar to these games, it’s best experienced with little to no prior information. It’s a pertinent, cautionary tale of the power of language and the dangers that come with the pursuit of control. While I didn’t quite catch on to the game’s message immediately (hence 3 of the four restarts), the more I learned, the more I wanted to.
