TR-49 – the eerie codebreaking narrative deduction game from renowned British studio Inkle (Heaven’s Vault, A Highland Song, 80 Days) – is getting a Switch release in a few weeks, Inkle has announced. TR-49 will arrive 7th April priced $7 (or whatever that equates to in your region).
TR-49 is a mystery housed in a machine, inspired by vintage wartime codebreaking contraptions such as those created at legendary British codebreaking headquarters Bletchley Park; think Alan Turing, think the Enigma machine. There is actually a compelling true story behind the game linked with Bletchley Park. It’s also a kind of database-scouring found-footage game – or found-audio in this case – similar to a game like Her Story.
In TR-49, you operate a mysterious machine while scouring its literary archive for a book which no longer exists in the material world. And it’s no ordinary book; like so many of the other publications stored in this strange machine, it’s focused on the exciting and sometimes illicit potential of dark matter, and theories once considered occult – a presence you feel here too.
It’s against this eerie backdrop that another story is layered on. As you rifle around the machine looking for codes to enter – codes to align you closer with the truth – the story of a family who built the machine emerges. But what happened to them? And why is this machine being targeted by an outside force?
I reviewed TR-49 for Eurogame and rated it highly. “Inkle mixes archive-surfing and audio drama to create a surprisingly powerful story of obsession and a machine,” I wrote. Fair warning, there’s a bit of tenacity involved in chasing the answers through the machine, but I don’t imagine that’ll dissuade many of you.
TR-49, despite being a relatively small project for Inkle, enjoyed big success: it had the largest launch of any game Inkle has made. This surprised Inkle and led co-founder Jon Ingold to wonder whether smaller “one-sitting games” were the way to go.
