TR-49 Review – Review – Nintendo World Report

Tomorrow TR-49 releases on Nintendo Switch. The next game from one of the industry’s best narrative indie studios, Inkle. It had caught my attention back when it launched on PC and mobile at the beginning of the year. While I’ve had access to the game on Switch for the past two weeks I unfortunately have to report that in its current state I cannot write an objective review on TR-49. As much as the presentation and premise had me hooked, actually playing this game has been an utter disappointment on Nintendo Switch 2. According to the the development team they’re still trying to replicate my technical problems, so for the meantime please enjoy this review-in-progress.

In TR-49 you play as Abbi. An archivist who is tasked by a mysterious man to find a secret book within an enormous digital archive. This computer has been running since the early 30’s and its users have submitted an incredibly large amount of literature, books and papers to the machine for reference. The book you’re tasked to find has a title, but no one knows what is inside this title. Through using mysterious codes and assigning titles to the works in the archive, you hope to find the clues necessary to discover this mysterious book.

As an archivist by day, this game immediately drew my attention. Games like Her Story, A Hand with Many Fingers, Return of the Obra Dinn and even Inkle’s previous work like Heaven’s Vault using lost codes and language to understand the world of the game are right up my alley. The strange machine you use to interact with the texts uses a wonderful design interface, where letters need to be combined with numbers to form a four digit code. With a circular design that is reminiscent of code-breaking machines from the 1940’s it helps to set you in the story. As you’re doing research you are frequently contacted by your mysterious quest-giver, who tells you more about what is going on in the outside world and the importance of this machine.

This is what Inkle does so magnificently. Using characters to tell a story that works on multiple levels. Whether you’re trying to follow along with the story being told in the books you access from the machine, or understanding what Abbi is doing in this basement with a machine she clearly knows nothing about. There’s of course plenty of twists and turns, but I’m particularly glad that you don’t need to read pages of notes to understand what is going on. The key phrase of every work is highlighted alongside notes from other users of the machine how this piece of text may relate to different materials from the archive. This comes together with you assigning titles to the different works and once you give a text the right title it becomes fully legible. The game keeps notes for you like important characters, codes and texts, though a notepad can certainly come in handy.

But now we get to the crux of why I’m hard pressed to fully review this game. Because on Switch 2 I’ve had a terrible time actually playing the game. Whether it is a delayed input (loading screen or not) when accessing your notes and files, the game taking several seconds to traverse between texts and loading them in and the over six times I’ve had the game fully crash. The autosave is generous, but for a game that is all about reading texts and solving puzzles, this simply kills any momentum and interest I’ve had in exploring the depths of this machine. The game relies on longer sessions of play so you can keep track of the connection, but this is exactly when the game starts to stutter and crash. And for a Switch title being played on Nintendo Switch 2 I cannot even begin to imagine how this fares for users on Nintendo Switch.

I had my hopes up that Inkle would release a fix or patch before the embargo was up, but this seems unlikely to happen. At this time I find it hard to recommend TR-49, which pains me because I did get really into it. If you’ve loved Inkle’s previous narrative adventures like 80 Days, Overboard! or Heaven’s Vault, TR-49 is another wonderful mystery tale from the studio. But please make sure that Inkle has updated the game on Switch before you jump in. In its current state I cannot give TR-49 a proper review and if I did it would not receive a passing mark. It’s been quite some time since I’ve had the unfortunate experience of playing a ‘broken’ game, but I am also hopeful that Inkle can go back and clean up the gameplay experience here.