As an English Literature graduate, I spent a lot of time for my degree digging through letters and records to link up with the various books I studied. It’s not just the core of what’s in these texts that can be so fascinating, but exploring the context surrounding them can also bring you to exploring interesting ideas and revelations that go way beyond what the original author intended.
That is, to say, I found the core gameplay loop of TR-49 to be a game that is just ripe for historians, archivists, and nerds to enjoy. This is just for the fact that it’s a game that begs you to keep exploring, uncovering stories and details, that are each wrapped up in their own little mysteries.
TR-49 is the latest title from interactive drama studio Inkle, the developer behind 80 Days, A Highland Song, and Heaven’s Vault.
It’s a narrative-heavy deduction based game, a mix of The Roottrees Are Dead, Her Story, and The Return of the Obra Dinn, crossed with audio dramas like The Magnus Archives and ars PARADOXICA.
Set in an old church basement, you play the role of Abby, a person tasked with searching through an archive of lost books, journals, and letters that have been stored inside a World War II-era computer. Created by Bletchley Park engineers Cecil Caulderly and Beatrice Dooler, the machine was fed these texts over the span of fifty years in an attempt to crack the code of reality.
Your job is to navigate the archive and find links between each text, matching names with the records in the hope of unearthing one specific entry: Endpeace, a stolen book at the centre of this mystery.
The entirety of TR-49 takes place within the interface of this titular computer; a large, bulky piece of hardware that merges advanced nuclear-age functionality with the bulky aesthetics of 1950s technology. In it, you can find the titles of fifty different sources which you must then link up with certain codes that correspond to that text.
For example, one entry on the computer may reference a text called “An Image In Water”, which you’ll then note down. Then it becomes a matter of using the information in the log, as well as context in other logs, to find An Image In Water in the machine to link up with the title.
There are 50 texts in the game, but the only one that matters is finding Endpeace, a book that contains a world-changing secret. I won’t spoil what that secret is, but as is usually the case with Inkle games, it’s a narrative device that keeps you hooked for pretty much the entirety of the game’s full playtime.
It becomes quite compelling to learn more about these characters, to a point where it’s not just about locating Endpeace, but also unlocking wider context surrounding the computer, the texts contained on them, and the individuals involved with creating them. Over time, you become engrossed in searching for new details about certain characters or events, which only add up as you find new texts linking to each other.
This is all delivered within a wider overarching story taking the form of an audio drama, where your character speaks to their handler, a bloke named Liam, who stresses the importance of finding Endpeace and unlocking its secret.
You can speak to Liam at any point in the story, who gradually reveals more about the world Inkle has built for TR-49 along with additional context for the texts inside the machine. The performances of Abby and Liam by Rebekah McLoughlin and Paul Warren play a large role in this fantasy too, with McLoughlin bringing an authentic level of curiosity to her role, while Warren delivers his lines with such importance and candour that helps to pace the story as one of urgency.
For such a text-heavy game though, that shouldn’t discount the excellent art design that TR-49 features. Everything from character biographies to the design of the machine itself has this old-timey feel to it, a relic of an older generation, and it really helps to sell the idea that you’re sifting through old texts to find something valuable.
All of this is to say that I think Inkle is on to another banger here. Narrative has always been one of the studio’s strongest points, but I absolutely love the way it unfolds here, where much of the backstory can only be pieced together by you. It’s a great method to tell a story in a way that only video games can, by emphasising the interaction between the player and the game, and is now one of the finest examples of doing this.
Pros: Excellent narrative structure, robust art design, great for Steam Deck play
Cons: Some puzzles can be tricky
For fans of: The Roottrees Are Dead, Her Story, Heaven’s Vault
9/10: Exceptional
TR-49 is available to play on PC now. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.
