TR-49 is the latest game from inkle, the studio behind detective games Overboard! and Expelled!. TR-49 is another deductive reasoning game, but this label doesn’t quite give you the full picture. You play as Abbi, who has been tasked by a mysterious man called Liam to start interacting with an odd machine in a basement. Thrown in the deep end, you must use the machine to begin aimlessly reading and connecting summaries of various novels, articles, research papers, letters, and more.
TR-49 is a difficult game to describe. If you have played Her Story or IMMORTALITY, you will have some idea of what to expect. By deducing titles, the initials of authors, and the year in which a document was written, you gradually begin to form a chronology of people, relationships, publications, scientific theories developed over centuries, and much more.
At first, it’s overwhelming, but within 20 minutes I was hooked and ended up finishing the game in only a few settings, at around 4.5 hours total playtime. Progression is absurdly gratifying; you start timidly attempting to parse a huge amount of seemingly unrelated information, and before you know it, a solid shape begins to coalesce in your mind. It’s like reading a novel from scraps you’re putting together yourself.
Abbi and Liam converse over the radio, which helps provide some context to what your mission is and what you should be aiming for next. These exchanges function as a narrative framework for what is otherwise a game about searching a database and are effective at keeping the tension high when required.
Abbi keeps a journal that gets automatically filled out as you make discoveries, which is an enormously helpful tool. If you find a document that lists a birth year or someone’s maiden name, you won’t have to remember it yourself or note it down in real life; the next time you check the journal, it’ll all be there.
Whether it’s discovering an author’s pseudonym, birthday, or who they were secretly in love with, TR-49 is packed full of revelations and a surprising amount of emotion for a largely text-based game. It’s a game with a smaller scope by design, and it achieves what it sets out to without overstaying it’s welcome. Despite having found what I thought was everything, I have several achievements that remain locked, which suggests there may yet be more mysteries to uncover. So, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to nip down to the basement for a while…
Rating: 9/10
TR-49 was reviewed on Steam using a code provided by the developer.