Inkle’s TR-49 uses a tactile puzzle to probe truth and fake news

According to Polygon, Inkle Studios narrative director Jon Ingold developed TR-49 as a code-based, tactile puzzle game that thematically centers on revision and the erosion of trust in written truth, often described in the coverage as a response to fake news.

Ingold says the project began from a chance memory — a photo marked “TR-49” he saw while working as a math consultant on Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game in 2014 — and grew from a rolodex-style prototype built in Inkle’s Ink scripting language. What started as an experiment intended as a physical card game became a digital project built in Godot, with the team designing a clunky, microfilm-like machine that “eats” books, a soundtrack of recorded voices (Ingold recruited family and neighbors to read entries), and an opening quote from Tennyson among snippets from real and invented authors. The studio initially planned to release it for free but kept expanding the idea into a fuller game.

The whole development took about nine months, and Inkle says TR-49 became the studio’s most successful launch; Ingold attributes that in part to finalizing the playable component early and to an audience appetite for deduction and investigation games that indies can serve in ways he argues AAA teams cannot.