TR-49 review – Inkle does it again with an eerie hunt for answers within a mysterious archival machine

TR-49 lives as much inside the player’s head as it does on the screen, which I think is brave, because it demands something of us. It lives in our desire and hunger for a solution. This is a game where you need to think for yourself, where you have to think for yourself, because otherwise, you won’t progress. At times you will feel as though you’re mentally going around in circles, but they are necessary, these computation cycles, because they create time and space to think. To theorise. To speculate. To revise. And these are crucial things in grasping and understanding the sorrowful, darker side of the mystery lurking inside TR-49.

Mechanically, TR-49 is a game about sifting through an archive. You operate a vintage kind of computer terminal – and by vintage I mean really vintage, circa 1940s – which has come from the legendary British wartime codebreaking house Bletchley Park, I believe. But you’re not at Bletchley: you’re in a crypt underneath a church and the machine is there in front of you, wires and machinery scattered all around. A voice speaks, it’s a man, and he encourages you to turn the machine on and start searching through the archive. It’s an eerie start.

You’re looking for a book – this is a game about books, really. This strange machine was fed books and other literary sources in order to build a database or data set, which you’re scouring in the hope of finding a lost title that no longer exists in the physical world. Mechanically all you do, then, is input source codes, consisting of two letters and two numbers, much like TR-49, the code the game is named after. Should the code you input have an associated database entry then you’ll be taken to it, with a mechanical whirr and a click as the focus changes. There’s a pleasing tactility to it, and I like the way punching keys on my keyboard echoes the feeling of operating the machine (note: you can use a controller or a touch-screen for this).

The codes themselves you’ll have to discover, and herein lies the game’s bravery, because it refuses to hand the codes to you – so much goes unexplained, actually; you start entirely from a standstill, not knowing who you are and what’s going on or how the machine works. At the beginning, you’re encouraged to cast around in the dark, randomly entering codes like guesses, in the hope you’ll hit upon something, which invariably you do. The assumption is you’ll eventually stumble on something significant which will lay a path ahead of you that you can follow – a string of names and titles and authors and other key pieces of information. Through them, an interconnected web should start to appear, and with it, a bigger picture.

That’s a lot of bits and pieces to mentally keep track of but thankfully, mercifully, the game handles all of this – there’s no need for separate pen and paper. A wondrous journal automatically populates and organises sources as you find them, categorising them by author and highlighting key findings, even drawing your attention to things you might want to look again at. It’s an enormous help and a vital feature for an experience like this, though even with it, I struggled in the beginning.

I spent at least a couple of hours looking at TR-49 like it was a magic eye puzzle before it properly came into view for me. I was doing what I’d been told – matching sources and titles – but only because I’d been told. I was casting around in the dark, waiting for something to click, and the longer I waited, the more frustrated and detached my trawling around became. TR-49 felt cold and distant, out of reach, and I had to fight with myself to stay with it. I mention this because you might feel the same way when you play, and also because this is what the game risks, this reaction, in order to prop up the revelations that come next.

Sifting through an archive sounds dry but it’s only as dry as the sources you’re sifting through, which in this case are obsessions with the mysterious existence and capabilities of dark matter energy. That’s not a boring subject, nor are the people who are writing about it – a collection of eccentric thinkers from the early 20th Century whose ideas border on the occult, talking of exploring dreams and losing their minds. They’re bizarre, colourful accounts. They’re mixed with archive pages for books from our real world, by the way, which lends these fictitious authors an air of authenticity and adds to the excitement of what they claim. There is a waft of science-fiction running through this, then, but it’s the kind that’s not far removed from magic, and with which anything seems possible. It’s as though you chase genuinely world-shaking ideas through this machine.

But the real story of this game is of the people who made the machine, whose lives you uncover both in the archive entries they wrote – everything in the machine was entered by someone, which means everything has a perspective, an opinion – and in the notes they wrote on other users’ entries. There are multiple voices here, which appear and reappear throughout the archive, sometimes years apart. And it’s through them that the game’s deeper story emerges, one that’s sorrowful and personal, with twists and turns, and it brings a needed dose of personality to the game and archive. Theirs is the ultimate riddle you’ll solve.

It’s a quiet wonder how much TR-49 contains, really. To look at it is to not expect much, perhaps. Besides the crypt interior and the archive pages there isn’t anything to see; and though the audio conversations impart energy and urgency, and a sense of a wider setting, there’s 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 pages of the archive of the machine, and it’s testament to the strength of Inkle’s storytelling that it manages to conjure something so impactful from it. It’s also inspired how our involvement in the game as the player, our interaction, mirrors the biggest ideas written about in the archive pages. There’s much about this game that will stay with me, and to conjure so much from seemingly so little is impressive – very impressive indeed.

That’s not to say TR-49 always clicked for me. As I’ve said, there were acute moments of difficulty at the beginning as well as near the end, when I searched endlessly for clues but found none, and gave myself a headache in the process. Flicking from journal to archive page and back again was not generally a pleasant experience, when done so many times. And in these moments, when I slipped off the game’s tracks, so too did my enjoyment slip. But whether this is my fault or the game’s, I don’t know. It’s probably mine; now I know the answers, I can clearly see the clues. They are there. But this knowledge doesn’t change the fact I had a bumpy experience that I didn’t always enjoy.

Nonetheless, I admired TR-49 in those moments for holding its nerve, and for letting me, the player, do the work. In asking for my investment it made me more invested and left a stronger impression upon me as a result. It was – and I’ll stop saying this now I promise – a brave creative choice to make.

Whether you’ll like TR-49 as I did will probably depend on your tolerance for persevering with a puzzle, but should that sound like fun to you, there’s a parabolic conundrum inside this machine that you won’t quickly forget.