It’s a sophisticated disguise, in a way Thomas Was Alone turns the enforced simplicity of a game made by one person into a design choice.
Its use of colour and shadow, too, elevates it aesthetically from what you might expect of a one-man game at this price point. As any of the trailers will show you, Thomas Was Alone complements its simple gameplay with some beautifully minimalist music by David Housden – an ethereal piano score dotted with chiptune flourishes that evokes a kind of spaced-out loneliness, and works very well as a complement to your mental self-wrangling as you try to work out a level. Though it never exactly builds to a sense of urgency, your curiosity about the Event (and about what happens to Thomas and his friends) intensifies towards the end. Some levels are more tedious than others – the ones that involve a lot of precise staircasing and dangerous jumps will make you hammer your keyboard in rage more often than the more puzzle-orientated scenarios – but the pacing is clever enough to pull you through the game in just one or two sittings. Over the course of the game’s three or four hours, Bithell squeezes about as much novelty and variety out of its elegantly simple systems as humanly possible. Thomas Was Alone is only ever gently challenging, but it does quickly start bending your brain in ways it’s not supposed to bend, playing with gravity, perception and Portal-like ability-changing paints before it’s finished. The aim, in every level, is to get every shape to a portal once they’re all in place, they’re zapped to the next level. Some are devious, some cantankerous, some mildly evil, but most are pleasant characters reacting with mild bemusement to their newfound consciousness. One shape can float on water, one acts as a bouncy trampoline smaller, nimbler rectangles can be stacked to create staircases for larger, more ungainly ones, many of whom have complexes about their size. You begin the game with a single red jumping quadrangle – Thomas – and pick up friends along the way, all of whom are different personalities with different abilities. Each of its ten chapters begins with a fictional quote or two from newspapers, spokespeople and commentators at the time of the Event, but the narrative texture comes from the internal monologues of the cast of jumping rectangles as they navigate their way through minimalist, geometric levels. Narrated by Danny Wallace and made by Mike Bithell, Thomas Was Alone tells the story of the emergence of the first self-aware artificial intelligence.
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