Developed/Published by: Mike Bithell / Curve Studios
Released: July 24, 2012
Completed: 28th January, 2014
Completion: Completed the entire game, including collecting all the little collectibles that aren’t really in the game for any good reason.
Trophies / Achievements: 100%

Thomas Was Alone has a really good soundtrack.

…

Ah, I could leave it there, but I shouldn’t, really. Because Thomas Was Alone is definitely more remarkable than that! Even though it’s the soundtrack I liked best, it probably particularly works in the context of the game, which is an interesting attempt to properly merge some narrative with mechanics. I appreciate, actually, that it’s trying to do this by simplifying things as much as possible: it’s puzzle/platformer with story about some characters meeting, dealing with their own feelings about themselves and others, and working together. You, the player, take the role of the person making them work together by controlling them individually—using them to jump on each other’s heads to reach new platforms, and so on.

Everything’s represented by blocks and the story is entirely told through narration from Danny Wallace, ex-journalist for TOTAL! magazine and an extra in the movie Yes Man, who I have literally just discovered was born in Dundee. Here, his English accent (sorry Danny, it’s not an insult) gives Thomas Was Alone a more intense “THIS IS BRITISH” feel than a Routemaster bus filled with black pudding and the Beatles hanging out the arse of it. It feels so whimsically Brit-me-do that I desperately want to fit it into the milieu of games like VVVVVV which are built upon earlier British games like Manic Miner and that; indeed switching characters makes me want to bring up something like Everyone’s a Wally.

But that doesn’t really work, sadly, because while there’s definitely a really really strong argument that the game is just a load of blocks because it’s stripping things down—a bit like a science experiment—if you told me that Mike Bithell loaded up 2DToolkit in Unity, threw down some blocks and attached the default player behaviours to Thomas and said “that’ll do” I’d completely believe you. Because… it’s not really like this game feels particularly good. Some of it is stuff that you have to work around if you’re designing a game around block people. For example, making sure you make clipping the edge of a wall when jumping (because it’s a rectangle, and so are you) isn’t super annoying. Do you fiddle with the bounding box? Did Bithell do all this and fret and go “nah, nothing makes it nicer/that looks weird?” I can believe he did! But still, hmm.

There are a lot of other quirks, too. The main one is that the story isn’t actually that simple. About twice it removes old characters and introduces new characters, and—this really isn’t spoiling anything, as the first sentence in the game makes it clear—you’re actually controlling artificial intelligences within a computer system. You can feel the whole thing straining to be a bit cleverer than it has to be. The fact that there are some references to things like Portal in it do make me feel like it’s a bit too inspired by Valve’s “if you make the player feel like they’re in on the joke, it doesn’t matter if the story fundamentals are wonky” thing.

Now, I can imagine people strenuously arguing I’m being too literal here, but if the game is about AIs learning, the soundtrack and narration are nice, and the simplistic graphics work, but the game feel is… ehhh, do I really have to play it? Couldn’t someone just code some pathfinding AI that learns levels and watch the game play itself? It would actually bring the narrative home in a much stronger way. And I suppose that’s kind of a sad statement on narrative in games, eh?

(At the very least, the other characters could have done something while I wasn’t playing them. They just stand there. Remember Everyone’s a Wally? Well, you don’t, but I mean when I mentioned it up there. The characters you weren’t playing wandered about with some very rudimentary AI. It made them feel real, you know?)

Will I ever play it again? No.

Final Thought: After everything I’ve said, here’s a thing Thomas Was Alone had going for it: it cost me $2.50 and it was less than three hours (I think, I didn’t count.) I actually had a quite nice time playing as a pre-sleep thing across a couple of nights. It was pleasant.