Tron: Identity is a genre-blending experience that brings the world of Tron to life. Released on April 11th for Steam and Nintendo Switch, the game is part-visual novel and part choose-your-own-adventure, with additional puzzle elements added in to keep the gameplay feeling fresh and rewarding. Identity boasts great characters along with a compelling mystery, and it’s a surprisingly fun and engrossing experience, even for gamers who aren’t normally fans of visual novels.
Though based in the Tron universe, Tron: Identity is very much its own thing. Set in a second grid, players take on the role of Query, a detective program who is called in to investigate a robbery. Not only is the culprit unknown, but it’s also not clear what exactly was stolen.
From there, players must investigate the crime scene, interview suspects, and ultimately, create a network of friends and foes. As you meet new characters, the game’s world is further revealed and it becomes clear that there are massive religious and political battles taking place on the Grid, with some programs idolizing humans – or “Users” – as gods, while others feel that programs should be more focused on each other since Flynn abandoned the grid long ago.
The story moves quickly and you never feel like you’re slogging through tons of dull or boring dialogue. In total, the story is around 6 hours, making it easy to complete in a single weekend and to play through again, where you can make different decisions and see new outcomes.
The coolest part about Tron: Identity is its unique gameplay. On the surface, it’s a visual novel – there is no voice acting or moving characters. What sets it apart is its diverging pathways. Depending on where players go to investigate, who they interrogate, and the phrasings they use, the game changes. Every new character can become a friend or enemy – and your alliances with characters can impact how other characters view you.
This is such an awesome and rewarding game mechanic because you’re not just playing for a potential alternate ending – you constantly change the story with each decision. Every single move a player makes needs to be carefully thought through. There is no turning back once a decision has been made and the impacts of your choices last throughout the game. This raises the stakes and means no two players will have the same storyline.
Tron: Identity also incorporates great visuals to keep each scene feeling fresh and lively. Taking inspiration from Tron: Legacy, the game is loaded with glossy neons painted against a deep black background. Each image literally glows with neon hues, so you’ll actually want to take a moment with each scene to look around the image.
To help encourage players to explore the images, the game also has a cursor. You can drag it around the screen and sometimes find a little glowing dot. When clicked, it will offer some additional background detail into the world.
The soundtrack is also great and will be best appreciated on PC or while having the Switch docked. Both the visual and audio elements really help make each moment of Tron: Identity beautiful and help keep the game from feeling slow and uninteresting.
Throughout the game, players will often find characters who have damaged identity disks and are missing data and memories because of it. To fix this, players are given a puzzle. Inspired by Bithell’s earlier game, The Solitaire Conspiracy, the puzzles in Tron: Identity are centered around matching tiles and numbers. But bugs and glitches add new rules to each puzzle, making them increasingly difficult to solve.
The puzzles help break up the gameplay and make Tron: Identity feel like a well-rounded, full game, not just a book with pictures. Towards the end of the game, they can also get quite difficult, adding in some genuine challenges and upping the ante to the game’s intensity.
To my surprise, I actually really liked playing Tron: Identity. But for some players, it’s going to feel slow and boring. A lot of gamers want action. They want to move, explore, shoot, jump, and run. And no matter how great a story Tron: Identity tells, it is still a visual novel at its core, and that is bound to turn off some players.
But with its altering story paths, vibrant visuals, and the inclusion of point-and-click and puzzle elements, Tron: Identity feels like more than a visual novel, or, at the very least, it’s one of the only visual novels the average gamer will enjoy. It’s a noir detective story that makes you feel part of the game and keeps you interested and eager to know how your choices will impact the events. The alternate story routes give it great replay value, and encourage you to chat with friends about their outcomes.
Tron: Identity is a surprising game that very easily could have fizzled into a boring, forgettable snore-fest, but instead is engaging and fun. As someone who isn’t a fan of visual novels, I have to give Identity credit for being a fun and engrossing adventure.
I loved that my decisions had a heavy impact on the game. Tron: Identity doesn’t just give you different choices to make you feel like you’re having a personalized experience. Your choices genuinely alter the game, sometimes for the worse. You can make horrible mistakes and befriend the wrong people, you can even derez programs – which means you kill the character. These choices can help you, or blow up in your face. The stakes are high because so much control is in your hands. You’re on your own, and I think that’s absolutely brilliant.
A key was provided by PR for the purposes of this review.
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