TR-49

Someone described this as "Wikipedia rabbit hole as a game" and yeah, that fits the bill. Cool idea! Wish we had more games like this. The start of the game is slightly chaotic -- while you're trying to learn what's going on and how to even play the game, the story wants to proceed at a relentless pace through the audio interjections. It creates this air of pressure, which is *not* indicative of what the rest of the game feels like, thank goodness. The story is rather captivating. I think I pieced together some of the parts a little too early for my own good, but I enjoyed it regardless. I played with the "Reduce hints" option on, which was apparently added after release. I don't know how it affected the gameplay, but I wasn't stuck very long in any part. It's not a very long game: slightly more than 5 hours for completion. Well worth the price, especially for fans of the genre.

I have a love/hate relationship with this game. I love the concept and idea, I love the story, voice acting and dialogue between the characters. I adore the aesthetic, it's certainly pleasing and itself creates a world tells it's own story. The game, however, is rubbish. I hate the scrambling of text - even when it's turned down, it impedes gameplay (sure, it's the deter brute forcing but some of the logic you might be a year or two out and it punishes you heavily for it). So firstly, you should be told about HE47 - that just heals the text. I understand why the texts scrambles but it doesn't mean it isn't a bad feature. The game should better explain what the machine is and what it does and not so be vague The story is vague, I understand that [spoiler] Liam [/spoiler] is keeping [spoiler] AB81 [/spoiler] at arm's length for a reason, and is being a bit of a cryptic turd about it but you're then thrust in the middle of all these books passages and revisions. You have to keep track of so many people's stories to understand what's going on but also it doesn't explain anything in enough detail to even understand it. I completed the game with only struggling with the the last 2 names/books and I still didn't understand what was truly happening with all these authors. Only with the importance of the book and the machine. Everything is just so vague, and if it's vague with following the story imagine how much of a pain it is to follow context clues to work out people and dates to input into the machine. The game doesn't tell you that there are hints. At the beginning you're prompted with voice lines such as "This one's easy" but in the journal you have codes and titles (under authors) with red dots and asterixis an it doesn't state what those mean. What 'hints' are they hinting to? In most cases it's just saying "you're missing a code related here" without directing you to an actual hint. So, actually, pretty irrelevant. After I got my head around that much I restarted the game a few weeks later and tried again. And I had a better experience but the game just isn't fun. The music is painful and repetitive, ultimately distracting and anger inducing. The game is already infuriating enough, the music was not helpful. And there's so much information to shift through and no real way to record what's what. By the end you're writing down codes on a pen and paper, crossing them off because they 100% do not have any relevant information possibly relating to the last few titles and codes you need to find and pair up. If I have to reach for an outside source to help keep track of an overabundance of information in your game then I can't rate the game. Have a decent feature that allows you to take proper notes *or* better design the game to not to be so purposefully overwhelming and confusing. Again, I say that not because I struggled but because it is just annoying. Lastly... a huge failure from a concept perspective in regards to the story is having the player [spoiler] act like they're human and interacting with a terminal when AB81 *is* the machine. It's so non-sensical. [/spoiler]. And that point stood out more to me after having lastly played 'The Incident at the Galley House' which felt loosely similar. 3/10 is the best I can give it. It's so close to being an amazing game, it has the bones for it but it just does so much wrong I cannot forgive it for.

I really want to like this game, but I just can't. I can tell there is an amazingly interesting puzzle game in front of me that I am not allowed to play, because every 5 seconds I hear the sound of radio static and the "give me a line of dialogue" button at the bottom of the screen starts flashing. Then I press it and get 1-2 sentences of deliberately nebulous plot exposition that actually seems really cool and right up my alley from a "modern technological eldritch horror" standpoint (think Laundry Files), but at the same time is veering dangerously close to just being "rich people bad because rich". I would ignore it if I could, but I keep getting tags for names and events in my journal as I listen to this, so I presume that will be required to solve things at some point. If all this was a massive 30 minute cutscene at the beginning of the game that would be one thing, but right now I feel like I just spent 20 minutes listening to an audio drama that pauses itself every 10 seconds and makes me press play again. I am going to walk away from this for a bit and try again once I've calmed down. I did see another review say the whole game isn't like this, so maybe if I stick with it for longer it will get better, but this is definitely the worst first impression I've gotten from a game for quite some time.

Well ... this one has me torn. I loved the deduction and reading, trying to piece things together. And I loathed the cryptic dystopian story that had me dangling mid-air all game long and even after the end. I simply couldn't make head or tail of anything, which became somewhat frustrating. The well-done deduction part and the technically well-executed game have me leaning towards the thumbs-up button. But TR-49 makes me wish there was a neutral option. While some of the things do fall in place eventually, a lot of it remains in the dark. I still don't know what "revisions" actually are in this game, which meant that I had to google the other endings (originally I ended up saving one person but not "the world" if you like - don't want to spoil anything). I still haven't got the slightest clue why it was vital to destroy a certain book, nor why the machine is supposed to be a menace to mankind. Admittedly, I may have missed a clue in the conversation (which was easy enough to miss as I was reading text on the machine at the same time that my character or her counterpart started talking). And I am not really into Sci-Fi stuff, so my brain automatically reverts to reality mode when trying to make sense of stuff. Add to that being thrown into the very deep end of a world and mechanics that you are supposed to take for granted, and I was lost at sea at the very start. As I mentioned before, I really liked the deduction work leading to new clues and entries. I also liked the novel approach of entering commands into a machine that only allows you to enter a combination of two characters and two numbers. The aesthetics are well done (keep in mind, you spend all game in front of this machine) and I think the price is very fair for what you get. If you are less rigid than I in accepting an implausible (or impossible) Sci-Fi scenario that defies reality, and if you like books and a world that revolves around the power of the word, this should be the game for you. Take your time, read everything thoroughly and let the sleuthing begin.

I recommend this game, though somewhat reluctantly. The dialogue and voice acting almost completely ruined the whole thing for me. I don't mind the esoteric vague plot that some people are complaining about, I think it works fine, it is more or less coherent. But the constant whiny inflection in the voice acting was grating to me. There's too much of it and yes there's storytelling and that's all well and good, but it's all told in the same annoying way. Would it have killed them to crack a joke or two? The reveals just didn't have much impact either. The deduction puzzles are decent, it was fun to piece together all the connections between the different characters, I enjoyed my time with it.

This review pains me to write. I really wanted to like this game. But it's just flawed in too many ways. Let's compare it to The Return of the Obra Dinn and The Roottrees are Dead, the two games I think are the peak of the detective genre. First: The voice acting. This is the most notable critique I've seen in other reviews, and they're right. This game's use of voices is frankly abysmal. The acting is fine. It's the placement of the voices during gameplay that ruins it. I'm here reading documents, trying to piece together a complicated narrative, and it is consistently interrupted by the characters talking. Maybe whatever they said was important. I didn't care, I tuned it out because it was ruining my flow state. It is unreasonable to expect players to stop everything they're doing to listen. It is even more unreasonable to have a talk button that activates for a few seconds and if you miss it, it's gone, sorry. I just stopped trying to talk because I quickly realized the silence was better. In Obra Dinn, the voice acting happens in a consistent place, is always relevant to the story, and never interrupts your analysis. In roottrees, the voice acting happens when you advance further in the story. Both are far better than this. Secondly, the game's story doesn't really suit this medium. The idea is cool. [spoiler]But when the point of the game is going through documents in a non-linear fashion, having the documents effect each other nonlinearly is just needlessly confusing. The story itself isn't crazy. DMEs and revisions are just a gimmick, and a better story told through documents is still out there.[/spoiler] Lastly, why do I need to type in the password to see additional notes on a document every time? I should only have to do it once. Retyping it isn't hard, but it keeps this friction there that truly wasn't needed.

Short but interesting deduction game in the style of Her Story or Immortality. Navigating this book catalogue and discovering all the books and commands and passwords was surprisingly challenging, especially towards the end. It wasn't that hard to figure out what I was supposed to do and what are the "rules" but at some point you do feel like you are out of leads. At least I did. I really enjoyed reading everything and understanding the events that lead to where we were and what my end goal is, even if I did stumble on a few key moments or information by chance.

I enjoyed this game immensely for the puzzles. The story in the books and notes is great, the story in the voice acting is a little lackluster at parts. I highly recommend this game to anyone seeking a challenging puzzle game that requires you to use your brain to intuit new information as well as giving you the opportunity to advance without restriction.