In the black skies above Vertical Slice, the programs tell me they race lightcycles over rooftops. There’s not a lot of freedom to be found in the Arq Grid these days. Cycles and cycles ago, Flynn spun up a new server for ISOs to live outside the ravages for his perfection-fixated, auto-doppleganger CLU 2. Then he got trapped in his own grid by a program built of ideals he held onto too tightly then abandoned, and the Arq Grid was left to its own devices.
I’m sure it was really nice for a time. But rather than a clean and rigidly administered system, the ISOs were messy. They sat around for computer-centuries being “bio-digital jazz, man” and eventually there was a war followed by even more factionalism. In the countless computational cycles that ran their course, Core arose, doggedly dedicated to strict control, an authoritarian regime built on digital eugenics, hierarchical function, and the colors orange and red. Of course, with every stranglehold regime, there’s going to be a resistance, and with the programs of the Arq Grid this manifested in a group of mostly Outlands-dwelling survivor-rogues doing their best to thwart Core and “reset” the system. But a lot of what they do seems to be “live an impossibly hard life off-grid.” Then there’s Automata, magenta and weird—Programs who believe in Programs and not the Users. They say they reject the structures of the user, but aside from being weirdo, annoying-to-kill digital warlocks, I’m not entirely buying it.
And then there’s everyone else. All the unaligned programs of Vertical Slice and other locales of the Arq Grid. Regular programs just trying to get by in the shadowy gaps of Core’s regime. Programs like Exo. A new hero for a new grid, Exo is about to have a really bad night learning about all this history and more.
TRON: Catalyst sucked me in with a clip that lasted only seconds. A swift-running young program edged in blue-white neon runs up an incredible double-helix stairway. Really, it’s a vertical slice of the Hudson Yard suicide-magnet monstrosity known as “Vessel.” But unlike that testament to bad taste and worse sense, this structure was beautiful, an isometric playground edged in pale light. I wanted so badly to work the small bones and musculature of my carpometacarpal in a smooth circuitous motion as this dashing figure ascended the heights of this structure. It was enough to make me forget how mad I was with TRON since 2010’s hatefully uncreative TRON: Legacy. I’m a sucker for a good stairway.
That was months ago. And now, 13-ish hours later, I can safely say that I was right. It’s a really satisfying fucking stairway. Yeah, I’m a sucker for staircases. But if I’m honest with myself, I’ve been a fucking mark for TRON since way back.
Around Mile Post 14 on the Outer Banks of North Carolina there was a mall. A proper one. Enclosed. Not a string of storefronts or those weird open-air things you find today. An indoor mall. A bastion to the American will to dominate and control, to enforce rigidity to the flow of temperature and humidity with technological systems. It was cool, and well lit, an oasis from the 98% humidity 90*F days of a coastal Carolina summer.
Now unfortunately, but expectedly, they undid all of that and turned it into one of those hideous non-descript suburban plaza superstructures. But before then, inside, tucked away next to a Radio Shack was a dark, cavernous space. The exaggerated blackness of a room illuminated just by the glow of CRTs and pre-Govee edge-lighting. At the time, it was the only real arcade a proper urbanite child of the ‘80s would recognize in the whole of the Outer Banks (even if it was suspiciously non-smoking). Outside in bold rounded letters, illuminated from within and glowing faintly blue, three words welcomed all: GAMES PEOPLE PLAY.
I don’t even think I’d watched the movie the first time I was given a little plastic stepstool so I could see over the edge of the controls and wrapped a tiny brown hand over the radial puck and took hold of the translucent blue control stick. When my dad showed me the movie, I was only more hooked, somewhere between the secret life of programs, the religious purges of a juiced-up chess program, and Bruce Boxleitner’s popcorn. But for years and years, I kept coming back to GAMES PEOPLE PLAY, and that lonely TRON cabinet tucked away behind the newer, flashier games at the front. If you asked me, I would nod and unequivocally say that TRON was my shit, even if I had maybe only watched it a handful of times between 1987 and 2009.
And then TRON: Legacy came out and the daring world drawn up by Jean Giraud, Syd Mead, and Peter Lloyd was smeared into a post-Matrix snoozefest, punctuated only briefly by Michael Sheen doing his best “What if Ziggy Stardust was your shitty ex-boyfriend who said he’d help you move?” That’s how Disney gets you. And I just stepped away, leaving TRON to sink into the Sea of Simulation to a relatively uninspired Daft Punk beat.
Much like the space outside of the Grid, the treacherous and destructive Outlands, Disney is a creative wasteland, an auto-cannibalizing hellscape run by people so nakedly composed of greed and obsessed with numbers in Excel spreadsheets they need someone else to make and explain for them. Disney is a space where dedicated and talented creative people who want to make things go to be consumed in the hope of playing in spaces they love, making cool things they believe in with like-minded people and what they are promised is a titanic amount of resources. It’s this creative wasteland that Bithell Games carves out their own Arq Grid to try and make something new and different in the TRON space.
One of the most crucially different things about TRON: Catalyst is its perspective. And no, I don’t mean thematically. Where some might argue that a first or close-following third-person perspective gives a player a greater connection to a game’s action, environment, and characters, by taking an isometric stance Catalyst‘s developers have created an elaborate circuit board of a city for Exo to course her way around like an electrical current. She moves fast, responsively, over sidewalks and streets, up stairways and ladders, vaulting through windows and even along rooftops. If there’s a load-bearing surface, you can guarantee she’ll slide across it effortlessly. Free and effortless movement, you know, the thing that totalitarian regimes love restricting. This is why the programs race their lightcycles across the rooftops. It’s illegal in the streets. Shift your perspective, shift your elevation, and suddenly possibilities open.
Exo learns all about what is and isn’t permitted the second she explodes in the street, just as she begins her last delivery of the “night.” She wakes up in the orange room of a loud orange man named Conn, who starts unknowingly shouting about being stuck in a “Loop.” He means this metaphorically, conversationally, but of course Exo is about to find out how literal it is for her.
Looping is big business in videogames these days. With the mainstreaming of Roguelike mechanics in hits like Hades and Blue Prince, and the millions sold on the Miyazakian take on Live, Die, Repeat in Elden Ring, it was inevitable that eventually a TRON game would have its own something to say about the act of rebooting. While predominantly a narrative device, and an explanatory way for Exo surviving the countless derezzolutions (a spelling I’m still mad about) accrued over the course of brawling your way through antagonistic Core, Automata, and Reset programs (or the abrupt End of Line from colliding with a LightCycle’s energy wall), because any data that Exo accrues in one cycle is carried over on her Identity Disc, recycling the loop is often the only way to reset Core’s alert state, traverse hard to reach and restricted areas, or help out an NPC in “the past.” Sometimes resetting the loop just saves you from a long walk back—but it’ll also rob you of an illegal lightcycle joyride too. As much as the narrative emphasis is put on the exposure to the titular Glitch catalyst that’s causing Exo to loop, I’m glad that it’s only a relatively minor function of the game. In all honesty, I’m kind of over looping as a mechanic and Catalyst just manages to not overstay its welcome in this regard.
Combat, unfortunately, does. It’s not that brawling in Catalyst is bad, it’s just that as a program Exo isn’t built for it. She’s a courier program, which makes her way more badass (and much less of a “golden retriever”) than RAM, the actuarial program for a big insurance company who really enjoyed helping Users plan for their futures in TRON. But she’s not really built to be a Disc Warrior, not even with the help of friends, a maxed out (if anemic) skill tree, and the ability to steal modifiers from enemies. Also, there’s a parry button. It makes sense, if you’ve watched TRON you’ll know that parrying is actually a surprisingly big part of melee and ranged combat in the movies. Catalyst just doesn’t make it satisfying. Enemies’ tells are extremely obvious, but waiting around for them drastically impedes the flow of movement, which is already impeded by having to stand around and clear out rooms of enemies to make doors open back up. Remember how I said I came here for the movement? I couldn’t count the number of times I tried to outrun packs of Core lightcyclists or push past warriors with their glowsticks only to be confronted with a locked door and 10 guys I needed to mop up. Exo’s three hit combo with her Identity Disc is serviceable enough. It’s satisfyingly thwonky, but the recovery feels a bit clunky. And even though her melee skills never evolve, most enemies go down in a single cycle. And because this is TRON, of course you can fling it like an Aerobie, the beach menace of the ‘80s (which is actually a lot more natural-feeling and satisfying with a mouse versus a controller?). Like I said, it’s not bad, but it’s never as fast, as smooth, or as deep as you’d want it to be for how much fighting Exo is forced to do in TRON: Catalyst. The same could be said for most of TRON: Catalyst, unfortunately.
As beautiful and engaging as the world that Bithell Games has built for Catalyst is, and as pleasant as it is to move around in it, there’s just a surprising lack of anything going on in it for Exo to do besides move and fight. There are no real mysteries on the Grid and allies are won over at the drop of a hat. Some sidequests and NPCs have poignant and meaningful stories, but they take such a back seat to fighting wave after wave of Core grunts. Cutscenes and voiced dialogue are passionately acted and delight in a sort of BBC “restoring” Lost Doctor Who way, but the limited character portraits presented in such a static manner feels out of place against the very conscientious update to the flat “edgy cyberpunk” nature of TRON‘s 2010 Aesthetic. For every brilliant stroke that gassed up my engine and made me want to play more, there’s a big orange roadblock. Bithell Games has pulled even the smallest fragments from the universe of the films and incorporated them, but to an uncertain end. While 10 to 12 hours (closer to 10 if you get bored with combat and set it to Story mode like I did) of gameplay feels like the perfect runtime for a TRON game, it simultaneously feels like too much and not enough for TRON: Catalyst. It’s a world that I genuinely want to explore, but need more in those hidden corridors than data shards and more shortcuts. I love TRON, something that I didn’t really think was still the case until I played TRON: Catalyst. But sometimes something gives you just enough to reignite a long lost sense of wonder. And because I can tell that same sense of joy and wonder undergirds Catalyst, it makes it all the more disappointing that it can’t quite deliver on it. For all the incredibly talented work on display, Catalyst ends up a game that can’t quite figure out how to fill its own space, and still chafes against the lack of room to full render. But goddamn does racing a lightcycle on the streets in defiance of Core feel good.
TRON: Catalyst was developed by Bithell Games and published by Big Fan Games. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and Switch.
Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.
