I wasn’t surprised to hear that there is a sequel on the way for Tron: Identity, the 2023 visual novel by Bithell Games (Thomas Was Alone). However, when Mike Bithell started his presentation on its follow-up, he excitedly pointed out that they had everyone fooled into thinking they were going to make a series of visual novels. Disney Tron: Catalyst is not that.
I’ll be honest, when he said that, I was hoping for a new FPS. I still have a huge fondness for Monolith Productions 2003, Tron 2.0 – as does Mike Bithell. Disney Tron: Catalyst (the PR person stressed the “Disney” party, but this is the last time I’m including it)isn’t that either, but it is an isometric action game. Yet, despite keeping your fingers busier, it seems that the new title in the Tron universe will still be narrative-focused.
Tron: Catalyst is still a sequel to Identity, even if it dropped the visual novel format. While you don’t play as former protagonist Query, they do play a role in the new plot. It again takes place within the Arq Grid, an isolated server that has been left on its own and has continued to develop without user intervention. In fact, at this point, the existence of a user is just hearsay, and some have begun to believe that they don’t exist.
The sentence may not have made sense to you if you aren’t familiar with Tron. Personally, I only know most of the basics, having watched the original movie and played Tron 2.0 and Tron: Identity. There’s more beyond that I’m not familiar with, but Mike Bithell is clearly a huge fan, and working on games within the universe is something of a dream project for him. It’s hard not to find that enthusiasm infectious. Bithell’s games aren’t driven by corporate avarice but are instead labors of love, and I could totally feel that in Tron: Identity. In fact, while writing this paragraph, I looked back at my review of the game and I mention that very same thing in the opening. I’m getting good at this.
But if you don’t know anything about Tron, I doubt you’ll be completely left in the dark. It involves a world inside a computer, and everyone depicted is some sort of program. References will likely be made, but (assumedly) none of the characters existed during the events of the movies, so they don’t have any knowledge beyond what you need. I’m sure Tron: Identity will be required reading, but you should play it anyway. It’s three hours long and fantastic.
Rather than just being a mystery, there’s combat in Tron: Catalyst. It’s perhaps what you’d expect from an isometric game in a post-Hades world. You can fling your disc, roll, and parry. After demonstrating the combat, the demonstration moved out into the streets to show off the light-cycle and semi-open-ish world. It’s not a true open world, Bithell stressed. The team calls them “big levels,” but they remain chunks of a fully explorable city. They tried to capture the verticality of Tron cities by including verticality wherever they could, pushing you up to the rooftops.
The big twist to Tron: Catalyst is a Groundhog Day-esque looping system where you reset everything back to the initial event. The goal of each loop is to obtain things that you can take back with you to the start of the loop that will enable you to change the events of the game. The one demonstrated was having Query (the protagonist of Identity) rewrite your identity disc so you can get into the city without the guards hating you.
Bithell also acknowledged that, with looping, there’s the risk that players will have to play through the same thing repeatedly. In order to cut down on this, a shortcut code can be obtained throughout the big levels, which can enable you to get where you’re going without taking the scenic route every time.
Speaking of which, despite how Tron: Identity was, despite the open-ish (not really) world, and despite the time loops, there isn’t “an enormous amount” of branching planned for Tron Catalyst. You can be “expressive” in conversation, but the action is largely “straight ahead” according to Bithell.
In all honesty, I probably would have overlooked Tron: Catalyst. Isometric action games just don’t grab me these days. In fact, I don’t remember how I ended up playing Tron: Identity. But I’m glad I did, because that gives me all the reason I need to get excited. As much as I don’t have much of a stake in the Tron series, but because Bithell Games wants everyone to see it the way they do, I know that it will be a meaningful experience.
