TR-49 review: Inkle’s codebreaker game is another winner

I follow a simple rule in my videogame habits: if Inkle releases a new game, I will play it. The studio has focused on narrative-driven experiences that are often open-ended and centre player choice. Inkle has never made an experience that isn’t at least interesting, and while TR-49 is not necessarily one of their top-tier titles, it’s still an excellent, abstract and lovingly weird piece of storytelling.

You play as Abbi, an unseen protagonist who has been tasked with searching through an archive for a particular piece of work – a book that has, apparently, caused a great deal of harm to erase. Your interface is filled with a round screen attached to a machine, and you enter different four-digit codes into the machine to search through the 50 sources that are archived within it. Articles are stored by the initials of the author, then two numbers to indicate the year of publication. If To Kill A Mockingbird was in there, for instance, the code would be HL60.

As you search, you can radio in to a mysterious handler that is guiding you through the experience, who will slowly reveal more about the device and the world you occupy.

Finding clues

Through your readings you’ll find clues towards new codes as well as publication titles; correctly matching codes to titles based on context clues will unlock new entries in your database, slowly unravelling the machine’s mysteries. There are 50 titles mentioned in the database that you can match to their codes and in doing so, you’ll start to get a sense of the game’s larger concerns and mysteries.

There’s a larger metanarrative explaining why you’re doing the work you’re doing, and which fleshes out the world beyond the machine screen you spend the entire game staring at. Coming to grips with what this story is, and what it all means, is your other objective.

Alongside these 50 titles you also have a list of authors, and tracking down all of their pieces that have been fed into the machine involves some keen detective work. TR-49 isn’t necessarily a game full of twists and turns, but it does feature a steady escalation in the facts it presents to you: the stakes increase dramatically as the story develops.

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A machine with an enigma

Mechanically, TR-49 is pretty basic. You enter codes, read excerpts and database entries for each item you uncover, and try to puzzle out what codes might lead to other entries based on your readings. As you go, you’ll start to uncover some shortcuts and tricks, as well as codes that allow you to expand certain entries to gain more information.

Sometimes you’ll find yourself hunting for a code over a range of years, entering sequential codes counting up until you eventually get a hit – not necessarily the most engaging activity, but finding the next trail of breadcrumbs is always exciting, and the game finds a few clever ways to play with the format to make you think laterally.

The archived articles come from several different (fictional) sources, and one of the joys of the game is tracking all of the rivalries, conflicts and changing arcs of these writers over the years. One author wrote an incredible philosophical treatise one year, but is now suspected of being a plagiarist because of the lower quality of their later work; two authors were both in love with a third, and that drama plays out across their work; and an academic journal is both a useful source of book names and a great way of tracking how public opinion over these writers shifted over time.

The big revelations hiding in TR-49’s narrative are interesting, if not always particularly shocking. Since you can find codes in any order the game has a non-linear quality, and sometimes you’ll spend a long time searching for a page only to find it full of coy hints towards things you already knew about.

But there’s so much good stuff buried in the game – fun revelations, interesting characters and some neat wrinkles with how the game uses its codebreaking premise – that I never had a hard time pushing through my moments of frustration when I felt myself getting stuck. By the end I wasn’t sure if I quite had all the details right in my head, but I understood enough of the big picture to have a good sense of the story Inkle was telling here, and it’s a good one.

I played the Nintendo Switch 2 version of TR-49, and I wish I had stuck to the PC version. It’s not just that the interface design suits the PC better – using a controller works, even if it’s a little inelegant – but the game runs surprisingly poorly on the system, with long stuttery pauses and many moments where the game would freeze unless I went back to the Switch home menu to re-enter the game.

The nature of the game meant these issues didn’t stop me from being able to play it, but they were frustrating. If Inkle ever upgrades the game for Switch 2 and supports mouse mode, I daresay that version will become the definitive one.

TR-49 is being sold at a low price ($10.50) and for that you’re getting a game full of clever ideas, interesting characters, and a central mechanic that continues to evolve in interesting ways over its six-hour runtime. It might not be my absolute favourite Inkle project, but my maxim still stands. If they release a game, it’s worth playing.

TR-49 is available on PC, Nintendo and Apple.

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