Reviews

I feel like my brain is broken. Sci-fi mystery puzzler TR-49 is the exact sort of clue-hunting solve 'em up I normally love. But somewhere in its thorny forest of fictional author names and twentieth century dates I got lost, hacking my way through more with frustration than curiosity. 

It's packaged as a codebreaking game, but really it's a "database game". Imagine Her Story in an alternate history. You type codes into an odd machine to reveal snippets from books or journals. You're here to find a particular book. But the texts you discover are mostly the jumbled notes from previous users of the machine. Sounds intriguing, and many scribbles display a great range of writing styles. But I found slowly constructing my understanding of the plot and its many characters more cumbersome than rewarding. Putting its cryptic story together felt like building a cathedral out of SQL.  

Some basics. You're Abbi, and you're stuck in a dank cellar with the strange machine. A voice comes over the radio, a bloke called Liam, who asks you to start toying with the levers and dials on this weird old codebreaker.

A popular stereotype of surfers is that they're attractive airheads. A fit waverider doesn't have time for big thoughts, beyond explaining that the moon is, like, totally in league with the whales, man. This is a lame stereotype, and yet a helpful image when it comes to explaining how I feel about dashing surf 'em up Sword Of The Sea. (We don't mind reviewing 5-month old games here at Jank). This game is beautiful, toned, ripped, fashionable, athletic, and it has a great ear for music. It also has the conversational skills of a post-huff stoner, and its visual similarity to Journey only invites an unflattering comparison.

The game itself is an approachable ride. You swoop along in smooth arcs and can leap into the air, double-jumping for extra trick time, cruising through ultimately linear sandy levels that coax you toward lanterns and bells that turn sand into seawater and unlock the way to the next area. It only lasts about 3 hours too, meaning it can glide in and out of your life with unobnoxious merit. If you've got a subscription service that includes the game, there are worse ways to spend an evening.