It took me an hour to get the joke. TR-49, the newest puzzle game by 80 Days and Overboard! developer Inkle, is leetspeak. “TR-AP.” “Trap.” The computer that drives the story is a trap. It’s an ancient, creaking, inscrutable thing, a database no less Eldritch than any monster from the sea. It consumes media, mostly books, journals, and correspondence, but it also seems to “revise” them without the input of the people who feed it those documents to begin with. And it’s the target of Abbi, a young woman who’s been charged with finding—and deleting—a book of extraordinary and terrible power. She has to sift through files, titles, names, and links to track it down, and a password to wipe it from the hard drive. All she needs are the right codes: two letters, two numbers. Only 67,600 possible answers.
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TR-49 continues Inkle’s pedigree of strong puzzles, beguiling mysteries, and stripped down presentation. The game plonks Abbi down in front of the computer, with only a monitor and a lever, and it asks her to search. The monitor shows one page in the database, an excerpt from whatever it’s documented, the writer and publication date, a short description by whoever uploaded it, and maybe a link to another page if it’s referenced in the description.
Outside of those links, the lever is the only way to input a message; put in your two letters and two numbers with a goofy radial dial, and if something’s listed under that code, you jump there. However, most of these pages are barely legible thanks to years of disintegrating hardware, inscrutable revisions made by the computer itself, and limited knowledge from the people who ran this thing. Abbi needs to correctly title each page in her notebook to fix most of the corruption and reveal the names and titles of other pages. Her journey, then, is in the search. She finds pages, she finds titles, she sticks the right ones together, she reads the cleared text for the next clue. Like many great puzzle games, each page could be a bit of flavor text, or it could lead to the next ten clues.
Image: Source Gaming. TR-49‘s main image. Scroll down, grab the titles in white, click links, add codes. You’re never from some thread to follow.
This is the whole game. There are other puzzles, including a surprise text adventure, but no actions exist other than those four-character codes. No extra rooms, no sneaking challenges, no anything that would get in the way. It’s all looking up names and initials, checking dates, finding clues in other documents, and doing a little bit of guesswork. If a series of overwrought sci-fi novels is described as lasting a certain number of years, use that to figure a range of dates. Read the summaries of magazines and check how their issue numbers relate to the year they were published. Notice if a writer used a particular tic when titling her books. Most importantly, study the codes you have, find the rules used to write them, and notice when those rules are broken.
As this goes on, TR-49 drops in plenty of optional hints, particularly messages that note that Abbi is capable of matching a title and page from the knowledge she’s gathered. From my personal experience, it’s very generous, and the limited expression does make it possible to brute-force the occasional answer. It does make the game significantly easier than other puzzle games of a similar nature, but that’s not something I find bad, and it can be turned off in the menu. No matter what, the actual process is generally quick, and the pace of the sub-ten hour runtime rarely lets up.
Image: Source Gaming. Because the game involves seeking out pages and seeking out titles, you’ll often find one long before finding its associate.
Continuing the theme of cutting out everything that doesn’t matter, the game is incredibly sparse. The only “graphics” are the computer, a massive collection of notes and indexes, and dialogue captions. Abbi has a friend who walks her through the process, and they build a rapport that teaches us about the world. As they interact, and as you and Abbi read these old documents, you uncover a conspiracy involving anarchist science fiction writers, rival literary publications that engaged in theft and assassination, a paramilitary force that might bring the world’s most powerful people back from the dead, and reality-piercing alterations that the computer has only supercharged. It is a bottle episode of television, all enclosed, which only enhances this constant feeling of being cramped by both stone and misinformation.
At one moment, Abbi is described as having been “buried alive,” and that isn’t wrong. She starts the game with almost no preexisting knowledge, and it takes only a few pages of documents for her to start drowning in information. The main threads are full of grief, disconnection, paranoia, mendacity, and the way those get twisted through this act of obsessive cataloging. This machine existed to collect knowledge without any “agenda” or specific goal, but instead it rewrites and misinterprets its own data in ways that are actively dangerous. It’s never implied that the computer is evil, simply that its attempts to do its job are no less destructive than any fascist force whose stated goals include the erasure of history. The story makesTR-49 rather timely in an era of mass misinformation and rampant AI misuse. Of course, its structure means it has no time for anything else, but I don’t think that’s bad at all. The game does a lot of work to help you along the way.
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In the past ten years, and especially after 2015’s Her Story, we’ve seen an exploding sub-genre within the world of puzzle games. “Information games” like Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, The Roottrees Are Dead, Tunic, and Inkle’s Heaven’s Vault are united by a few specific tropes. Primarily, they are about processing data: identities, documents, videos, family trees, crime scenes, an entire language, anything that can be understood. You collect the things, study them, and use terms to answer a question, typically via some goofy, contrived device. Often, these individual stories revolve around some grand and seemingly impossible mystery, and we can only solve it through these smaller mysteries.
“[Victim A] died from [Cause of Death B] [caused by (Killer C)]. We can deduce this with a timeline, a letter, and the identity of [Victim D].”
The documents are both the goal and the hindrance thanks to their massive number—so many that checking every possible answer is unrealistic, but technically not impossible. In fact, the idea that you’re potentially a single letter, name, or flick of the D-pad away from the ultimate clue is itself exciting. “Fake OS” games like Her Story and Hypnospace Outlaw literalize this with fictional operating systems that mimic aspects of the internet or search engines. The fun is whittling down the red herrings, sussing out the real McCoys, and breathing a sigh of relief when the game rubber stamps your correct responses. These titles are brilliant. They’re clever and witty and tricky, and they often play fair. I do think that they’re also intimidating due to their sheer size and the complexity of their final questions. I’ll admit to having used internet walkthroughs to work through the climaxes to several of my favorites. But they do give a fantasy and empowerment that virtually no other kind of game can.
Image: Source Gaming. Because the game involves reading and studying materials, the main characters of the game are those materials’ writers. Their arcs are central to the mystery.
And perhaps the most interesting thing about TR-49 is how it feels like the most perfect distillation of the concept. Not unlike how Balatro or Vampire Survivors pared roguelikes down to the simplest, most immediate form, this feels like the most focused information and fake OS game imaginable. Abbi never leaves the room, her ways to interact are pared down, and the only tools she has to move are two numbers, two letters. TR-49. GA-00. LR-22. PK-36. Every form of communication is sharpened; every contour of the possibility space is shrunk and stretched.
This method of puzzle solving isn’t the best version out there (I prefer the physicality of Obra Dinn, the scope of Hypnospace Outlaw, and the story of Golden Idol), but it’s great at giving a super-concentrated experience. Perhaps what’s better to me is that it’s one of the most accessible versions of an inherently niche genre. In a genre that can fully submerge you in terminology, mechanics, and content, the simplicity makes it a lot easier to understand what’s going on. It’s also dirt cheap, and while I generally don’t like to incorporate price into reviews, $7USD is an absolute steal and worth it for anyone curious about information games but nervous about actually trying one. TR-49 is quick, propulsive, and I was able to make regular progress on even short bursts.
Image: Source Gaming. There’s an incredible specificity to TR-49 and its mystery that are extremely fun to work.
That’s especially important given that this review was conducted on the Switch port of TR-49, months after its January release on Steam, and the port does have issues. There are rare moments of slowdown or freezing, but it also shut down several times during my playthrough. It was apparently far worse before a day one patch, and for whatever it’s worth, this might be the least intrusive I have ever found forced game closures to be. TR-49 autosaves constantly, almost every time Abbi goes to a page, and it loads fairly fast. I lost effectively no progress every time it happened. Still, it’s both frustrating and surprising given Inkle’s long history of respectable Switch ports. It was surreal to face a shutdown literal seconds after I had titled the final important document.
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With its compelling plot and mechanics, TR-49 is a wonderful addition to the canon of information games. It pairs a fast, satisfying game loop with a timely story about preservation, misinformation, and the limits of machine learning. But its greatest strength is to provide this in a form that is easy to learn and fun to master. I would not call TR-49 the best information game, nor the most ambitious or clever or impactful, but I would call it one of the most accessible and great for both fans of the genre and newbies. Definitely give it a try.
Final score: 8 / 10
Thanks to Nantenjex for edits.
