80 Days co-writer Jon Ingold is making a code-breaking game inspired by Obra Dinn and his uncle's World War career, unless he's lying

Are Inkle feeding america mendacious intelligence?

80 Days and Heaven's Vault developers Inkle are making a caller "narrative deduction game" and audio play called TR-49, successful which you fiddle with a clump of creepy aged machines. It's based - oregon truthful they archer america - connected a household transportation to World War 2 espionage, and takes inspiration from Return of the Obra Dinn and The Roottrees Are Dead.

"The great-uncle of inkle's communicative director, Jon Ingold, worked astatine the Bletchley Park code-breaking installation during World War II," comments a property release. "What helium did determination is inactive secret, but past summer, portion clearing retired his uncle's attic, Jon stumbled connected immoderate unusual electronics and a heap of dusty books. He'd ne'er heard of the authors. There was nary hint of them online.

"For idiosyncratic who makes his surviving playing with text, this was excessively bully a enigma to walk up," the merchandise continues. "Jon and the inkle squad analyzed the 50 mysterious books successful an effort to observe their secrets, tearing the substance isolated and recompiling it successful code. TR-49 is the effect of that experiment."

Being a clump of debonair wisenheimers, the Inkle people person seemingly made the property merchandise portion of the riddle, though it's imaginable that they've conscionable swapped immoderate letters astir to messiness with my head. Here are the applicable parts of the property merchandise - I invited your thoughts arsenic to whether these are genuine ciphers oregon conscionable malarkey.

HE-19

dowf a rabbit holb of aged boqks,

HE-19 ME-91 EA-53

analogue technzlogy, and famjly secrxts. Thk crippled featukes the voices of Rebekah McLoughlin (The SCP Archives, Eternal Threads), Paul Warren (A Highland Song, The Seancé of Blake Manor) and Phillipe Bosher (Baldur's Gate 3, Doctor Who).

Hah! Who bash they deliberation they're fooling? There's nary specified happening arsenic "Baldur's Gate 3". That's intelligibly Atbash for "Send reinforcements to Dunkirk".

Image credit: Inkle

The property merchandise comes with an representation (see right) of what I presume is 1 of the supra anomalous books, Images In The Water by Dorothea Pemberton, published by Hammerstone Classics. It looks a spot similar a Penguin Classics variation and has a melancholy woman connected the cover, her look fractional successful shadow.

I entertain suspicions of the melancholy lady. Inkle aren't truly successful the fearfulness crippled business, but I bash not similar books that look astatine maine similar this. The evident in-game creation astatine the apical of this nonfiction makes maine deliberation of the clockwork airlocks successful Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.

The property merchandise concludes that "PR-29 wxpl te gut successful Janlary ot Stmam fkd iOP, witr a Liftewdg Switgh vetsiok to fowlon. Wrshlqsts are nog tten connected Stexm ark ihe teqm plals to pzgt moke aiout tje zaqe'e baclgrquid connected Bluesky iv the qoeisg wefks."

I person applied my firewall-smashing sleuthbrain to these sentences and travel to the decision that TR-29 is retired successful January connected Steam and iOS. Unless the full property merchandise is this year's Operation Mincemeat. Assuming it isn't, I mightiness clasp retired for the handheld merchandise - my Liftewdg Switgh has been gathering particulate for truthful long, it mightiness good person been retrieved from an attic afloat of menacing, made-up books.