Renowned indie studio Inkle announces something quite different: a found-footage World War 2 code-breaking mystery

Renowned British indie studio Inkle – the creator of Heaven’s Vault, the Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series, A Highland Song, and many other glistening treasures – has just announced a new game. It’s called TR-49 and it’s part audio-book, part narrative deduction, based around a found-footage idea of cracking codes from a series of previously undiscovered and secret World War 2-era books.

The superb historical detective game The Return of the Obra Dinn is name-dropped as an inspiration.

The story for TR-49 goes that Inkle co-founder Jon Ingold had a great-uncle who worked at Bletchley Park, that historic home of codebreaking in Britain where pioneering computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing worked, and where the legendary Enigma Machine was developed to crack German codes.

Ingold was clearing out his uncle’s attic and while doing so stumbled on strange electronics and a pile of books, which he’d never heard of and that he could find no trace of online. And it’s these books – these 50 books – that will form the meat of the game, as we decipher their garbled text to work out what they’re about.

Actors Rebekah McLoughlin (The SCP Archives, Eternal Threads), Paul Warren (A Highland Song, The Séance of Blake Manor) and Phillipe Bosher (Baldur’s Gate 3, Doctor Who) will bring the story to life. TR-49 will be released in January.

Inkle’s latest game was A Highland Song a side-on Scottish hiking game infused with poetry and music and folklore, and the magic of the setting it’s based in. “A Highland Song is about what it feels like to be lost in the mountains. Not even lost, in fact. Just to be in the mountains, to have the privilege to exist there just for a bit, to experience them directly and extensively and know them as a process of living,” wrote Chris in our A Highland Song review.