This is a great puzzle game in similar veins to the Golden Idol series and more recently, the Roottrees are Dead.

TR-49 places you in front of a myterious computer screen in the abandoned basement of an old, forgotten church. It asks you to traverse this machine's mainframe that is filled with the written works of authors long dead, connecting each of these books, notes and essays with their special 4-digit codes. These codes are the language of every puzzle in the game, and you will soon become acquainted with the tactile brilliance of the system.

The game has two sides, fundamentally. The first focus is the puzzling and the narrative found within the texts that you are organizing and connecting together via these 4-digit codes. The title of the game, TR49, is a hint as much as it is L33TSP34K. The second side of the game is the narrative happening, more explicitely, outside of the computer screen. These portions of the narrative are delivered by voiced dialogs happening between "you" - a woman named Abbi who doesn't seem to have any memory of where she is or how she got there - and a mysterious, unseen man who talks to here via the radio. What does the man want from the poor Abbi? Well, as it turns out, there is a specific, hidden work in that computer that, if found and deleted, could change the fate of the world. But, how?

For the puzzling part of the equation, it is about finding and logging 50 codes of importance, and then matching those 50 codes to their proper titles. For example, Alice in Wonderland needs to be matched up with the code, "LC65". LC stands for Lewis Carrol, and 65 denotes the date of the book's publication in 1965. Once both of these are found, the player can match them together and they are one step closer to their completionist's dreams. Of course, some of the works in the computer are superfluous, while others are context to what is actually going on in the game's world. How did the world become so dire? And how does the machine itself fit into this fate? You will learn about the authors of the works you find, and figure out how they each fit into the history of the machine and the world itself. All of these details are steps towards answering those questions and finding the mysterious book in question and subsequently learning how to delete it.

As for the narrative that hovers overhead of the puzzles, the storyw ithin the actual text are far more interesting. The voice acted bits of meta are sparse, overwrought, melodramatically delivered, and most importantly, often obstrusive to the gameplay. The nameless man will consistently interrupt Abbi and the player's attempts at reading and deducing. You will be told how important the work is, to ignore the fact that you don't know who or where you are, how dangerous the world above is, and in the most vague terms, how the book you are searching for is the key to it all. The moments of silence in which the player can finally read and figure things out in peace are breaths of fresh air. I can't help but think that all of this could hav ebeen somehow folded into the computer itself. I can see, from a developer and writer's standpoint, that all of this is here to give stakes to a threat that is otherwise obscurved by a mundane interface of text-only information delivery. But, I found it tedious. Considering just how muhc of it there is in short bursts, it felt suffocating - which I suppose is more of a pacing problem than a content problem. The worst part of it, perhaps, is the fact that it is all mostly pointless it is. The stakes it offers are smoke and mirrors and I think TR49's entire narrative would have been better servied if they could have come up with a way to bring this all into the computer interface with the rest of it.

This clash of the two sides of TR49, however, is a minor complaint when set along side and compared to the joy of solving the puzzle and traveling down the path of completion. The interface itself manages to feel tactile as you type in the codes and watch the interface move to the next file in the grid. Finding each new code and logging it. It is all very visceral in its function and simplicity. It may not be as strong as tying the Roottree's photos together with string, but I do think it is a more streamlined process at the very least and gets close to that level of satisfaction. Both of these games prove that the methods in which the player is asked to interact with a puzzle is just as important as the puzzle itself.

If you are a weird little freak like me, a born puzzler, you should definitely pick up TR49. Its cheap, its a great 8 hours of deduction with an intriguing story to unwrap if you cna get past the overwrought, overbearing meta narrative. Add this one to your collection.