Surprise: there's a Tron visual novel coming next year

Well this is just about the last thing I expected to see during a Disney & Marvel game showcase: Bithell Games, makers of Thomas Was Alone and John Wick Hex, are making a new Tron game. Tron: Identity, announced on Friday, is a "visual novel adventure" set in the world of Tron.

It doesn't sound like we'll be seeing Flynn, Tron, or other characters from the Tron films, though. Here's a snippet of background from Tron: Identity's Steam page: 

"In a new Grid, forgotten by its creator and left alone to evolve without User intervention, an unprecedented crime has been committed. The Repository stands at the center of this society. In the aftermath of a break-in, the future of this Grid hangs in the balance.

"TRON: Identity is a visual novel adventure following Query, a detective program tasked with uncovering the mystery of what was taken and by whom. Finding yourself in a world built on unstable foundations and filled with whispered knowledge, it’s up to you to question suspects and investigate your surroundings to piece together the truth."

According to the Steam page, your decisions will influence how Identity plays out and lead you to one of multiple possible endings. And it's not all talking: as in many visual novels, there will also be puzzle sections, which here will involve "defragging Identity Discs."

A detective mystery on the Grid sounds pretty cool, though to be honest I'm hopeful that Disney greenlighting a new Tron game means we'll see another film follow Tron: Legacy someday. Maybe now that director Joseph Kosinski has made a billion dollars with Top Gun: Maverick, Disney will let him make that Tron sequel he had planned out back in 2015.

Tron: Identity is coming out sometime next year.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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