Finished TR-49
Note: in this post, I tried to not spoil any puzzles or story elements for this game. But it's me complaining about some of the mechanics and presentational choices in the game, so you should probably just not read it if you're planning to play the game soon!
I've got to play all narrative deduction games now, because it's a fun genre and people are doing new stuff in it all the time. TR-49, by Inkle, feels very similar to one of my favorite games in this genre, Type Help. Both of them use code-guessing as a core mechanic.
Code-guessing is a great deductive game mechanic because it requires the player to demonstrate understanding of the text by generating novel content - typing in a code into an empty field. Used correctly, this can make the player engage more closely with the text than, say, clicking on a short list of presented options can. The player needs to understand the material well enough to devise the code themselves and input it from scratch.
There's a lot of weird and interesting ways to present code input, and I think that if the list of options is sufficiently enormous, even games about selecting from presented options can feel like code-input games. A Hand With Many Fingers is essentially a code-input game, but you "input" the "code" by selecting which file cabinet and drawer to examine in your reference library. Each set of drawers represents a continent; each drawer represents a year. Knowing when and where something important happened allows you to choose a drawer; you must then choose a name from that drawer to complete the three-part "code" and find the ID for the next record you want to examine.
AHWMF prevents you from brute forcing these "codes" by requiring you to note down your chosen record code from the file cabinet, then collect that associated record by physically walking your character down into the basement and finding the records box you want to investigate. If you did this randomly, it would take forever. It's much quicker to put the work in to engage with and analyze the actual mystery!
TR-49 does not prevent brute forcing with the same vigor. Codes in this game have two halves. Once you learn how the codes work, you can absolutely brute force them as much as you want. There is a small UI effect which exists to softly discourage this behavior- the text of certain things will become slightly more scrambled if you're doing a lot of brute forcing - but I didn't find that it got in the way of me brute-forcing things. The game also seems to want me to guess randomly, sometimes. Each code has 2 digits in it, and there are a couple puzzles which can only be solved by checking several values from within a range of numbers.
The value ranges for puzzles are normally quite small, but sometimes, when you're stuck, this causes you to think, "perhaps I missed something and this is another range-checking puzzle," and then... make yourself check every single value in a much larger range of values for something you might have missed.
Type Help is my favorite code-input deduction game, I think, and it kind of made this precise type of brute forcing fun. Checking a range of values felt like leafing through boxes at a record store or something. Anything you found while brute-forcing timestamp codes in that game would be fascinating and would open up all sorts of additional mysteries for you.
Unfortunately I didn't feel like TR-49's brute forcing turned up interesting mysteries in the same way. I liked the game; it's short and fun and I did finish it; I can't call it bad. But it did leave me feeling a bit cold - mostly because the texts themselves were not interesting enough to make me feel like I was leafing through a record store.
It's really, really difficult to write analyzable texts for a mystery game that are themselves fun to read, independent of the mystery. I think Roottrees sometimes hit with this, and sometimes didn't. There are texts in that game that I hated reading. I didn't hate any of the texts in TR-49, but I often wished they'd been a lot meatier and more revealing of the game's world and the behavior of the people living in it.
TR-49 is not an "occult" mystery, but it borrows from a lot of genre storytelling about occult texts. The materials you're researching are often pamphlets and books written by people who were discovering dark secrets and mysterious techniques which could be used by evil people to access power. But you basically do not get to read these texts! In fact, each text is scrambled until you "identify" it, which means that all the secrets you're digging up are actually from the archivists' notes appended each text.
This does have the agreeable and probably scope-wise consequence of focusing the mystery on the people involved in writing and archiving the texts. Instead of looking for clues in the bodies of the documents, you're looking for clues in the archivists' opinionated summaries of the texts, in the writers' biographies, and so on. I think this was a wise decision, in the same way it was wise for Bruno Dias's deduction game Kinophobia to focus entirely on summaries of web searches rather than actual simulated websites.
But TR-49 left me hungry for some occult texts, goddamn it. I finished the game and still feel like I have no idea what precisely the bad guys were doing to use their evil powers. What rituals did they have? What processes did they go through to use their powers? What were their secret meetings like? What were their fights and confrontations with one another like?
And most crucially - what is the world like now, full of evils that your mystery might solve? When bad guys with occult texts are in power, what kind of experiential, sensory details about their world might you share with me? What is it like to live and work in this world? What are the bad guys doing with their power? Can you describe the places where they live? The things they do and buy? The evils they get away with?
This lack of experiential, sensory, and interpersonal detail is what left me hungry for the texts. The worst part, I think, is that all the archivists' notes on the text leave out this information as well, even though some of them certainly know this information. I think there were opportunities here for some of them to let slip some more illuminating details about the people, places, and experiences involved in the occult mystery. I kept wishing for them to go further, and they never did.
The game took me about 5 hours to play, and although I did get into a classic deductive puzzle game rut at the end, driving myself up a wall trying to solve the final mystery, I didn't experience as much frustration here as I have in a lot of other games in this genre. It's on the "easier" side, I think, for these kinds of games. It's fun! I did like it.
But I think fundamentally it falls to the occult mystery problem of not wanting to describe the actual occult shit. Choosing to not describe Lovecraftian monsters makes them scarier. Choosing to not fully describe psychotic visions and drugged trips and hallucinations makes them scarier. Stories in this genre do this kind of thing all the time.
But when the thing you're choosing to not describe is a book? An object that exists exclusively to communicate specific details which could bring about occult evil? Why can't I read that book???? It's right there! Open it up and show me the bad guys talking about their power and their plans! I'm hungry for the occult texts, god damn it!