I’m nearing the climactic finale of TR-49, a puzzling narrative deduction game from Expelled developer Inkle. My brain has reached a state of overdrive as all those cryptic notes unearthed on a glitching computer are starting to make sense. Or, at least, I think they are. By the five-hour mark, It feels like I’m speaking another language altogether, one I can only understand in fragments. My mind now thinks in four-digit codes, but the one I need to put an end to everything still eludes me.
It’s as I’m frantically flipping through a database, like a tourist searching their pocket phrasebook to find a crucial sentence, that I stumble upon something I’ve somehow yet to find. It’s a page from a literary magazine. I correctly identify it, matching the issue to its code, and the haze of static concealing its contents wipes away.
“If we write like cowards and we talk like cowards we become cowards,” the screen reads. “A coward will stick up for no one, even themselves. Dictators love a good coward! They are easy meat. They taste like chicken.”
It’s a striking moment of clarity in a game so wrapped up in riddles. Beneath the confounding layers of text and big-brained puzzles, there are simple truths at the heart of Inkle’s latest. The challenge is salvaging those truths from a historical record compromised by fear, intimidation, and censorship. To solve TR-49 is to reconstruct a reality that was rewritten in real time.
Right from its opening moments, TR-49 is dizzying. I’m immediately plunged into the dark basement of a church. Tubes and wires run across the floor, all leading back to an ancient computer. A panicked voice crackles over the radio. He tries to tell me what’s going on, but he’s rushing out the words too quickly for me to understand. The machine is some kind of World War II-era archive. It’s filled with books and letters. And one of those texts must be destroyed for the good of humanity.
I don’t know what any of it means, but I start fiddling with the computer anyway. I enter a code — two letters, two numbers — via a lever-based mechanism and the screen pulls up something from the archive. The text itself is garbled, but I can read an annotation on it that implies that the hidden document is called “Breakcode.” I click on that title and the character I’m controlling scribbles it in her notebook. I notice that the corresponding code I punched in also appears at the top of the page, and I’m able to move it. I drag it down next to where I’ve written “Breakcode,” and it’s a match! The fog clears and I’m now able to read the document, giving me hints of more texts I can find to start unraveling a twisted mystery.
That’s the gist of TR-49’s ingenious puzzle hook: You’re tasked with decoding a digital library’s obtuse classification system by finding, and then successfully pairing, titles and their corresponding codes. It’s a deduction game in the vein of Return of the Obra Dinn and The Roottrees Are Dead, but the internal logic is very much its own. The first puzzle is figuring out the anatomy of a code, making sense of digit strings that seem random, but very much aren’t. That’s when TR-49 is at its most immediately gratifying, quickly teaching you how to speak a digital language through well-laid text and audio clues.
There are some nuances to the way specific codes are constructed and the kind of documents they can dig up, but it’s easy enough to figure out codes once you’ve grasped the basics. Maybe a little too easy. TR-49 practically invites you to brute force its puzzles at a certain point, bypassing math word problems by dialing up two-digit numbers until something clicks. That may be by design, making sure that players never totally hit a dead end, but it’s a tedious temptation that feels inevitable once you’re left searching for the last few documents you’ve yet to find.
The more compelling puzzle is TR-49’s big-picture one. The codes are just keys that unlock lockboxes full of information; what’s inside those boxes is the real mystery. Each document builds out a web of interconnected people, from the computer’s creators to gonzo authors. A story runs through literary magazines and scientific papers from writers in conversation with one another. Even when the text is unscrambled, it still feels like reading coded messages.
The reasons for that become clear the deeper you go, even when the story itself feels impenetrable. Documents reference occupations, politically-motivated murders, and altered texts. The backdrop of World War II looms large over the writing that’s been fed into the database. You get the sense that everyone was forced to speak in riddles to avoid the wrath of oppressive regimes or powerful propagandists. Truth is encoded, leaving behind an incomplete record of the past defined by what couldn’t be said.
The more that resistant voices cave to pressure, the more the stage is clear for those in power to revise the moment.
With its roots firmly planted in Orwellian dystopia, the politically fierce TR-49 lands at a vital moment in history. Even in a mass communication age where it’s easier than ever to see the world for what it is, we watch as reality is distorted in real time. The press is pressured into watching the way it speaks about the United States government through intimidation, lawsuits, and cutbacks on access. Social media platforms are hijacked and their algorithms are tuned to manufacture consensus. Speaking up for what you believe in can get you fired, doxxed, or worse. The more that resistant voices cave to pressure, the more the stage is clear for those in power to revise the moment.
It’s when we see haunting videos of wartime carnage in Gaza, but are told the situation is too complicated to speak out against. It’s when we read documents that link the most powerful people in the United States to a notorious child sex trafficker, but are told to stop asking questions. It’s when we watch videos of a 37-year-old mother being shot dead in her car by an ICE officer, but we’re told she had it coming because she was a “professional agitator” who “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over” her killer, despite multiple camera angles disproving a patently absurd lie. Every day, there’s a new revision.
When we preserve all the cautiously-worded news reports and vaguely furious dissent on social media, all written in a coded language to avoid alerting the watchful eye of a digital surveillance state, what version of reality will they record? Will an archivist 100 years from now know how to read between the lines to solve the riddles of our troubled times? Inkle warns us not to play it so safe that we become fluent in the language of cowardice. Otherwise, we may as well start speaking in four-digit codes.
TR-49 is out now on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Steam Deck using a prerelease download code provided by Inkle. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.