Tron: Identity jacks players in with an alluring premise, a noirish detective adventure set inside the neon-soaked sprawl of Disney’s retro-futurist vision of cyberspace. Assuming the role of a detective program named Query, you investigate an apparent break-in at a structure known as the Repository, a vast and secretive datacentre at the heart of a Grid long abandoned by the Users who created it. The ensuing mystery is lightly intriguing, but as a slice of interactive detective fiction, Identity struggles to give its idea the breathing space it needs.
The story is divided into around 20 interactive scenes, through which Query interrogates the Repository’s various inhabitants while the player makes decisions based on their responses. Although the solution to the central mystery is fixed, Query’s relationships with the game’s suspects, witnesses, and victims are anything but. Within the three to four hour running time, your decisions can make you lifelong friends, sworn enemies, and quite possibly result in the “derezzing” (Tron’s equivalent of death) of just about every character in the story.
The flexibility of Identity’s narrative is its strongest asset, but it’s followed closely by the game’s presentation. Despite being limited to static screens, the Repository has a palpable sense of place about it. Its vaulted, luminescent spaces are true to the series’ distinctive aesthetic, while the soundscape combines a buzzing synth soundtrack with smartly deployed audio effects, such as footsteps that track with the narrative as characters wander around rooms.
Elsewhere, Identity’s limited scope serves it less well. There are only a handful of explorable areas in the Repository, and “explorable” is a generous term. Outside the dialogue sequences, there’s precious little opportunity to investigate the crime scene, search for clues, or generally nose around the building. With one exception, if you return to an area when no characters are present, the game will boot you back out, a missed opportunity to add layers to the Repository itself and to your role as a detective.
In lieu of more traditional sleuthing techniques, Query can “defrag” the memories of the characters he encounters to retrieve missing information. This involves solving a symbol-matching puzzle that combines elements of solitaire and dominos. This puzzle is mildly distracting, but quickly becomes tedious, and as Identity becomes increasingly reliant on it, you feel less like a detective and more like IT support.
Tron Identity has merits in its atmosphere and flexible story, but strip away the licence and what remains is a fleeting and unremarkable visual novel that lives in the shadow of better detective games.
Tron Identity is out now; £14.99
