49 Keys is a psychological horror interactive novel puzzle game developed by Michele Buonanno, Veronica Wu, and Fabio Porfidia, and adapted from the 2022 gamebook of the same name (49 Chiavi). I’m four hours into 49 Keys and, according to my achievements, this puts me at roughly halfway through the game. Here are my thoughts so far.
While I haven’t played/read the original gamebook, I was drawn to 49 Keys because it’s advertised as a puzzle game and its marketing material shows off some complicated-looking puzzles which I was excited to tuck into. If you’re wanting to play 49 Keys because of its puzzles then I highly discourage this as first and foremost, 49 Keys is an interactive novel. A very lengthy one at that.
It’s safe to say that you will spend most of 49 Keys reading, and if that’s what you want then it’s a very interesting novel so far. We play as a monk who receives a letter from his previous master, who is now dying and has left you his work. You immediately set off but don’t make it to the palace where he was working in time before he passes away. You must now navigate the palace alone, following the clues left by your master to locate the ’49 Keys’, presumably the title of his works, which dive into the forbidden knowledge of magic and the occult.
As mentioned before, 49 Keys mostly consists of reading and is essentially a book. It’s a well-written book, though does go way too far when it comes to scene descriptions. In a way that, if this were just a book, I probably would have put it down (but that is down to my personal taste as I know there are quite a few readers who do like heavy scene descriptions). 49 Keys is in desperate need of a narrator to not only lessen the amount of reading involved but to take this one step closer to a game rather than a book. In fact, it needs a narrator so badly that I instinctively started narrating the game myself out loud while playing it which made for a much better gameplay experience.
49 Keys is also in desperate need of more puzzles to break up the text, even if this came in the form of simple inventory puzzles. Otherwise, we can spend ages flicking through pages, simply reading a book, before we need to do anything game-related besides click on the next room to head into. A lot of the puzzles that are there are very intricate, requiring us to read in-game passages of more books to maybe piece together the recipe for a potion or use as a clue for a door puzzle. So far there has been one puzzle that was unnecessarily difficult due to poor design as it not only required knowledge of the Zodiac signs – I always go by the gospel that a good puzzle does not require further knowledge outside of what the game provides you – but also used really poorly drawn Zodiac symbols so it was incredibly hard to determine which symbol was which*. Capricorn, Taurus and Aries all looked the same and I even had to get a member of our team who has better knowledge of the Zodiac signs on the case to help work out which was which (she struggled too).
I’ve just reached a new section of the game where my inventory and clues have cleared to make way for more. The game hints towards multiple endings based on our decisions which I’m interested to see how this unfolds as, so far, I don’t believe I’ve made any decisions – unless maybe the order that I’ve solved puzzles is determining the ending.
Jess is playing 49 Keys on PC with a review code.
*Editor’s note: Since publishing the review, I’ve been advised that this puzzle is solveable without knowing the Zodiac signs. While at face value it does look as though you need to know the symbols in order to place the clock hands onto the right sign, the puzzle can be worked out without knowing the symbols by looking further into the wording from the book.
