Inkle mixes archive-surfing and audio drama to create a surprisingly powerful story of obsession and a machine.

TR-49 is a game that lives as much inside your head as it does on the screen. It is a brave experience because it asks a lot from the player. The game taps into our natural desire to find answers and solve puzzles. You have to think for yourself to make progress. If you do not engage your mind, you will not move forward in the story.

At times, you might feel like you are going in circles mentally. However, these moments of confusion are necessary. They give you the time and space needed to think, theorize, and speculate. This process is crucial for understanding the sorrowful and darker side of the mystery hidden within TR-49.

Gameplay and Mechanics

On a mechanical level, TR-49 is about sifting through a digital archive. You operate a vintage computer terminal. By vintage, I mean a machine that looks like it belongs to the 1940s. It appears to have come from the famous British codebreaking house, Bletchley Park. But you are not there. You are in a crypt underneath a church, with wires and machinery scattered around you.

A man’s voice speaks to you, encouraging you to turn the machine on and start searching. The beginning of the game is eerie and mysterious. Your goal is to find a specific book. In a way, this entire game is about books. This strange machine was fed many literary sources to build a database. You are scouring this database to find a lost title that no longer exists in the physical world.

Gameplay is simple: you input

Discovering the Codes

The biggest challenge is finding the codes. The game is brave because it refuses to hand them to you. In fact, much of the game goes unexplained. You start from a complete standstill, not knowing who you are, what is happening, or how the machine works. At first, you are encouraged to cast around in the dark. You enter random codes like guesses, hoping to hit upon something useful.

Eventually, you will stumble upon something significant. This discovery lays out a path you can follow. You will find a string of names, titles, authors, and other key pieces of information. Through these clues, an interconnected web begins to appear. As you connect the dots, a bigger picture slowly emerges from the shadows.

Keeping track of all these bits and pieces can be mentally taxing. Thankfully, the game handles this for you. There is no need for separate pen and paper. A wonderful journal automatically populates and organizes the sources you find. It categorizes them by author and highlights key findings. It even draws your attention to things you might want to look at again. This feature is an enormous help and is vital for an experience like this.

The Struggle and the Reward

Despite the helpful journal, I struggled in the beginning. I spent at least a couple of hours looking at TR-49 like it was a magic eye puzzle. I was doing what I had been told—matching sources and titles—but only because I was told to. I was casting around in the dark, waiting for something to click. The longer I waited, the more frustrated and detached I became. TR-49 felt cold, distant, and out of reach. I had to fight with myself to stay with it.

I mention this because you might feel the same way when you play. This reaction is a risk the game takes to prop up the revelations that come later. Sifting through an archive sounds dry, but it is only as dry as the sources you are reading. In this case, the sources focus on obsessions with the mysterious existence and capabilities of dark matter energy. This is not a boring subject.

The people writing about it are a collection of eccentric thinkers from the early 20th century. Their ideas border on the occult, talking about exploring dreams and losing their minds. The accounts are bizarre and colorful. They are mixed with archive pages for real books from our world, which lends these fictitious authors an air of authenticity. There is a waft of science fiction running through the game, the kind not far removed from magic. It feels as though you are chasing world-shaking ideas through this machine.

The Human Element

But the real story of this game is about the people who made the machine. You uncover their lives through the archive entries they wrote. Everything in the machine was entered by someone, meaning everything has a perspective and an opinion. You also find notes they wrote on other users’ entries. There are multiple voices here, appearing and reappearing throughout the archive, sometimes years apart.

It is through these voices that the game’s deeper story emerges. It is a sorrowful and personal tale with many twists and turns. It brings a needed dose of personality to the game and the archive. Their lives are the ultimate riddle you will solve. It is a quiet wonder how much TR-49 contains. Looking at it, you might not expect much. Besides the crypt interior and the archive pages, there is not much to see.

Although the audio conversations impart energy and urgency, there is a limit to what they can do. There are long periods of silence, with only the occasional self-remark and a haunting cello for company. The bulk of TR-49 exists in the pages of the machine’s archive. It is a testament to the strength of Inkle’s storytelling that it manages to conjure something so impactful from so little. It is impressive how our interaction mirrors the biggest ideas written about in the archive pages.

Challenges and Final Thoughts

However, TR-49 did not always click for me. As I mentioned, there were moments of difficulty at the beginning and near the end. I searched endlessly for clues but found none, giving myself a headache in the process. Flicking from the journal to the archive page and back again was not a pleasant experience when done so many times. In these moments, when I slipped off the game’s tracks, my enjoyment slipped too.

Whether this is my fault or the game’s, I do not know. It is probably mine. Now that I know the answers, I can clearly see the clues. They were there all along. But this knowledge does not change the fact that I had a bumpy experience that I did not always enjoy. Nonetheless, I admired TR-49 in those moments for holding its nerve. It let me, the player, do the work.

By asking for my investment, it made me more invested and left a stronger impression on me. It was a brave creative choice. Whether you will like TR-49 as I did will probably depend on your tolerance for persevering with a puzzle. But if that sounds like fun to you, there is a parabolic conundrum inside this machine that you will not quickly forget.