Exo is just a simple courier at the start of TRON: Catalyst, running through the city and delivering packages as quickly and efficiently as possible. But then one of them explodes, and she wakes up in an interrogation cell being accused of not only terrorism, but something much more troubling for the very fabric of the Arq Grid’s digital reality.
Tron Catalyst sees Mike Bithell and his studio returning to this world and continuing their offshoot narrative branch that was started in Tron: Identity. If you’ve played that game, a detective-style visual novel, there are characters and story beats that will be familiar to you, though it doesn’t feel necessary to quickly grasp what’s happening in the world.
The focus early on is on Exo’s plight. With her interrogator Conn unable to get the answer he wants out of her, he sends her down to the arena to fight for her survival… but here’s where the main hook of Tron: Catalyst comes into play. Exo is thoroughly unprepared to fight, but luckily has the ability to trigger a glitch that rewinds time back to the start of a loop. Right back to that interrogation with Conn.
Now she knows what’s coming, she can instead head off to train before fighting, learning the basics of hitting things with melee and thrown Disc attacks, dodging and countering. On the standard difficulty, you can initially just mash your way through enemies in this tutorial prologue, but there’s later enemies, more hulking figures with sweeping hammers and thrown explosives, that start to need more care and skill to overcome.
Looping around in this prison arena, the story guides you through breaking out of the prisoner zone, tweaking the loop in a Dark Souls-y way both by Exo having gained knowledge, and through unlocked permissions, doors and ladders persisting between loops.
But the game as a whole does not play out within a single loop that you need to manipulate. This prologue concludes as you break out of jail by crashing a Light Cycle through the wall and make it back out into the city, starting a new loop which you can, once again, use to your advantage. Obviously, the Grid’s forces are on high alert for you, checking Identity Discs for past misdeeds at various checkpoints, forcing you to fight your way through to meet a contact that won’t remember your interactions from previous loops. It’s only by getting this wiped or cleaned up that you’ll have full access to the city and start to piece together how tentatively balanced this world is.
There’s already been talk of the glitches occurring in the Outlands, while the Automata are establishing an embassy, bringing flowing, curved architecture and a more individualistic philosophy that will clash with the structure and order that the Arq Grid demands. You can sense that it could all go a bit wrong in a heartbeat – which is probably a really, really long time for these Programs – though how much freedom you have within this narrative wasn’t there to see within the opening two chapters of the game.
Tron: Catalyst plays out entirely from a fixed isometric view point. It really pops from the screen with the neon lights running throughout the world, around everyone’s bodies in blue, orange and more individualistic colours. There’s a gloss and sheen to the streets of the city, doused by digital rain, in a way that absolutely feels becoming of the revitalised Tron film franchise, and it’s accompanied by another soundtrack from Dan Le Sac, who composed for Tron: Identity.
One minor disappointment is that, for conversations that switch to full screen character portraits with voice acting, these are static (outside of some shifting lights) and often unchanging. Hopefully there’s more variety through the game as you meet more people.
Tron: Catalyst is shaping up rather nicely, expanding this classic sci-fi world once more, and with an intriguing glitched time loop at its core. We look forward to decoding it in just under two months, with the full release of Tron: Catalyst set for 17th June.
