Tron: Identity

I find it quite curious that questions of identity are far from being the core themes of Tron: Identity, which is much more interested in discussing the control and monopoly of data than anything related to the construction and framing of the self. This visual novel’s very brief runtime, however, shackles the story in such a way that it leaves no room for it to flesh out anything or go anywhere: Tron: Identity functions like the first act of a much bigger story, offering little to no payoff on its own.

We play as Query, “a member of the Disciples of Tron, a detective. No boss, no assigned task but uncovering truths. A professional observer.” Query looks for the truth and only that, vowing not to interfere with political matters during the course of his investigation, even though people – sorry, programs – see the likes of him as troublemakers anyway. One night – is there a day-night cycle in the Grid? – Query is summoned to uncover the truth of an explosion in a secure vault in the Repository. The game takes place entirely in this building as we try to discover who the culprit is and the reason for the attack.

Tron: Identity goes for a noir aesthetic, opening with a sentence that a detective from a pulp novel would utter before page five: “It’s a cold night in the city. Nothing new there.” The game’s world is oppressive, dangerous, and corrupt, but its battle-hardened protagonist is already accustomed to that: there’s nothing new there for him. Although we’re in a virtual world, it’s night throughout the whole investigation, too, and when we go out into the open again, we can see that the rain hasn’t stopped.

There’s night and rain in the Grid; these programs feel cold and fear. They get emotionally shaken by traumatic events. They cry; they feel betrayed. In other words, this is a tangible world where there’s nothing separating the programs from “real” people: much like in the first two Tron movies, their humanity is not a question; it is a given – and this is why Tron: Ares feels like such a regression thematically speaking.

But let’s forget Ares for a moment – or forever, if we’re lucky – because we’re here to talk about Tron: Identity and its noir setting, which is, unfortunately, hugely wasted, too. We’re a detective investigating a mysterious explosion in a corrupt world… except that there’s not actually much investigating going around. Query’s method for discovering things out is just talking to people and hoping they’ll say something useful: we won’t be analyzing crime scenes, gathering evidence, spotting contradictions, or deducing anything in the game, but just asking questions and doing an eventual minigame to recover the programs’ memories – which got conveniently scrambled by the blast.

This minigame, called Disk Defragmentation, is basically a matching puzzle, where we eliminate nodes by selecting two that match in either color or number: the game eventually throws in some new mechanics to offer variety, such as nodes that switch places with each other or generate more nodes if not eliminated in time, but the main problem here is that the minigame feels extremely detached from the story at hand – which would probably have more time to reach interesting places if it didn’t waste half of its length with characters just trying to recall who they are.

After all, as stated before, Tron: Identity doesn’t seem to care about questions of identity: who these people are is much less important than what they do with the information they’re given. In the Repository, we come across a library composed of digital trees, which serve as repositories of data – hence the name of the building. It’s a fascinating concept, as the ensuing metaphor means that information must be tended, cared for, lest it deteriorates and disappears: it’s an organic, evolving, complex being – and not the abstract, static, absolute truth that the main character believes it to be. The building’s evocative gardens, then, serve as a physical manifestation that “truth” is an ever-changing thing molded by the government.

The big boss in the Repository, Prinz – who’s enveloped by that red glow that signals danger –, believes that a select few should control said data, offering to the people only a curated, carefully framed version of it, so as to avoid chaos. “We don’t hide anything. We maintain society via careful control of data. It requires a delicate and respectful touch,” Prinz tells us in simple terms. Other programs, however, believe that everyone is entitled to the raw truth, to untampered information, which indeed sounds great, but I don’t know if they would change their minds after discovering that their divine “Users” have almost the entirety of human knowledge at the palm of their hands and yet some still believe, as if it were a matter of faith, that the shape of their planet is as flat as Tron: Identity’s characters.

Because here’s the thing, barely anyone here has time to develop a narrative arc of their own. These characters appear and disappear at the blink of an eye. The whole “truth is not absolute” idea has the potential to shake Query to the core, but the character barely even registers the discussion. Tron: Identity reaches its end credits in two to three hours tops, and half of that we spend solving random matching puzzles. This means that even though the game possesses a very small cast of characters, we’ll nonetheless spend little to no time with them, rarely having more than three brief conversations.

There’s this program called Sierra, who is an Automata – a new faction in the world of Tron, introduced here – with elusive goals and a menacing, imposing countenance. We cannot read Sierra’s intentions and, for most of the game, will remain unsure if they’re friend or foe – even after their role, or lack thereof, in the explosion is quickly revealed. However, after the revelation, the character just remains there in the Repository, without doing anything of note or serving a clear narrative purpose besides offering a bit of worldbuilding for future installments in the franchise. The game does nothing with him here.

This is the main issue with Tron: Identity: its story merely functions as the first act of a larger one. Take the main mystery, too: discovering who the culprit is for the explosion is just the first step in a bigger problem that Query doesn’t even begin to solve. It’s symptomatic that, at the end, we’re offered choices about what we think should be the next course of action for the character… and then the credits immediately roll. There’s no payoff here. No proper resolution.

And this also impacts the choices we make throughout the whole game. Here, we get to decide the fate of many characters, but whether they live or die is not something that really impacts the story in any meaningful way because there’s no time for their destinies to produce a ripple effect on the events. It’s all over too suddenly, too quickly. So, we can kill a character or let them live, but it’s a potato, potahto situation: you can read the words differently, but at the end, they still mean the same thing.

Finally, talking about words, the writing, although lacking in energy – which can also be said about the soundtrack, which goes for a subdued, somber vibe and ends up being just forgettable – at least makes use of the setting in some playful ways, such as in the description of a thief we meet called Proxy: “Her swagger implies causal charm, but you can sense a readiness to strike. Danger may not be present, but it is certainly pre-cached.”

So, think of the first act of a movie, those promising first thirty minutes that introduce some intriguing characters and problems before shaking things up, putting the protagonist in a tough situation. Now make these 30 minutes the entire experience, padded with some random matching puzzles. That, my friend, is Tron: Identity in a nutshell.

November 13, 2025.