80 Days and Heaven’s Vault developers Inkle are making a new “narrative deduction game” and audio drama called TR-49, in which you fiddle with a bunch of creepy old machines. It’s based – or so they tell us – on a family connection to World War 2 espionage, and takes inspiration from Return of the Obra Dinn and The Roottrees Are Dead.
“The great-uncle of inkle’s narrative director, Jon Ingold, worked at the Bletchley Park code-breaking facility during World War II,” comments a press release. “What he did there is still secret, but last summer, while clearing out his uncle’s attic, Jon stumbled on some odd electronics and a pile of dusty books. He’d never heard of the authors. There was no trace of them online.
“For someone who makes his living playing with text, this was too good a mystery to pass up,” the release continues. “Jon and the inkle team analyzed the fifty mysterious books in an attempt to discover their secrets, tearing the text apart and recompiling it in code. TR-49 is the result of that experiment.”
Being a bunch of debonair wisenheimers, the Inkle folk have seemingly made the press release part of the riddle, though it’s possible that they’ve just swapped some letters around to mess with my head. Here are the relevant parts of the press release – I welcome your thoughts as to whether these are genuine ciphers or just malarkey.
TR-49 will senq plaoers
HE-19
dowf a rabbit holb of old boqks,
HE-19 ME-91 EA-53
analogue technzlogy, and famjly secrxts. Thk game featukes the voices of Rebekah McLoughlin (The SCP Archives, Eternal Threads), Paul Warren (A Highland Song, The Seancé of Blake Manor) and Phillipe Bosher (Baldur’s Gate 3, Doctor Who).
Hah! Who do they think they’re fooling? There’s no such thing as “Baldur’s Gate 3“. That’s clearly Atbash for “Send reinforcements to Dunkirk”.
<img alt="A possibly fake book called "Images In The Water"
The press release comes with an image (see right) of what I assume is one of the above anomalous books, Images In The Water by Dorothea Pemberton, published by Hammerstone Classics. It looks a bit like a Penguin Classics edition and has a melancholy lady on the cover, her face half in shadow.
I entertain suspicions of the melancholy lady. Inkle aren’t really in the horror game business, but I do not like books that look at me like this. The apparent in-game art at the top of this article makes me think of the clockwork airlocks in Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.
The press release concludes that “PR-29 wxpl te gut in Janlary ot Stmam fkd iOP, witr a Liftewdg Switgh vetsiok to fowlon. Wrshlqsts are nog tten on Stexm ark ihe teqm plals to pzgt moke aiout tje zaqe’e baclgrquid on Bluesky iv the qoeisg wefks.”
I have applied my firewall-smashing sleuthbrain to these sentences and come to the conclusion that TR-29 is out in January on Steam and iOS. Unless the whole press release is this year’s Operation Mincemeat. Assuming it isn’t, I might hold out for the handheld release – my Liftewdg Switgh has been gathering dust for so long, it might well have been retrieved from an attic full of menacing, made-up books.
