80 days And Heavenly Vault The developers at Inkle are creating a new “narrative deduction game” and audio drama called TR-49, which has you tinkering with a bunch of creepy old machines. It is based (or so we are told) on a family connection to World War II espionage and takes inspiration from Return of Obra Dinn And The tree roots are dead.
“The great-uncle of Inkle’s narrative director, John Ingold, worked at the code-breaking base at Bletchley Park during World War II,” the press release comments. “What he was doing there is still a secret, but last summer, while clearing out his uncle's attic, John came across some strange electronics and a stack of dusty books. He had never heard of the authors. There was no trace of them on the Internet.
“For someone who makes a living playing with text, this was too much of a mystery to pass up,” the post said. “John and the ink team analyzed fifty mysterious books in an attempt to uncover their secrets by tearing the text apart and recompiling it into code. TR-49 is the result of this experiment.”
Being a group of cheerful wise men, the guys at Inkle seem to have made the press release part of the puzzle, although it is possible that they simply 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 real ciphers or just a hoax.
TR-49 will set sail
HE-19
dauf rabbit meat from old boxes,
He-19 me-91 Eu-KA – Kowai-pai
analog technologies and family secrets. The game features the voices of Rebecca McLaughlin (The SCP Archives, Eternal Threads), Paul Warren (The Highlander's Song, The Blake Manor Session) and Philippe Bosher (Baldur's Gate 3, Doctor Who).
Ha! Who do they think they're kidding? There's no such thing as “Baldur's Gate 3This is clearly Atbash for “Send reinforcements to Dunkirk.”
Included in the press release is an image (see right) of one of the aforementioned anomalous books by Dorothea Pemberton, Images in the Water, published by Hammerstone Classics. It looks a little like the Penguin Classics edition: the cover shows a melancholic woman, her face half in shadow.
I am suspicious of the melancholic lady. Inkle is not really in horror game business, but I don't like books that look at me like that. The obvious in-game art at the beginning of this article makes me think of the clock gates in Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.
The press release concludes that “PR-29 will operate in January or Stmam fkd iOP, with additional offerings for birds. There are no votes on Stexm and they plan to do this to help you get back on Bluesky in the coming weeks.”
I applied my brave brain to these suggestions and came to the conclusion that TR-29 will be released in January on Steam and iOS. Unless the entire press release is about this year's Operation Mincemeat. Assuming that's not the case, I might wait for a portable release – my Liftewdg Switgh has been collecting dust for so long that it could easily be found in an attic full of menacing fictional books.
