Thomas Was Alone

This has to be one of the dumbest, unnecessary examples of framing I’ve ever seen in a video game. It’s utter shit and pretentious to boot. Thomas Was Alone is a puzzle platforming game where you play as Thomas who is nothing more than a small red rectangle. He’s also not alone either as there are several other oblongs along for the ride. Oh, and a few squares too.

So anyway, on to the framing. There is some kind of bizarre narrative that takes place between the levels where each of the shapes have a backstory, character, likes and dislikes and lots of other things to make them more human. Did you know Clare is a superhero? Why, you ask? Because she can float on water. As a concept, It was seriously depressing, and I did my best to blank it out.

Gameplay wise, it’s actually quite fun and rewarding to navigate through the various levels. I didn’t use any guides for my playthrough so from my perspective, it was the right amount of challenge. The one criticism I have is that it suffers from the aged platforming issues of the ‘I PRESSED JUMP YOU FUCKING BLOCK!’ while you fall down to either death or the level below, having to reclimb – essentially the game failing to register a button press or just has a terribly fussy window of correct timing.

Looks wise, it’s a black and white 2D plane that you have to navigate across but this is all part of the design, which is basic but effective for the game’s genre and gameplay. Musically, it’s meh and follows the same pretentious pattern as the narrative.

And that’s what I don’t get. There seems to be an increase in the amount of games that have either an annoying or pretentious narrator, so it must be me that has the problem because there’s clearly a market for this shit.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

It’s a short list but only two are rewarded for playing through the main game and one of these is for jumping 1,600 times which is necessary to get to the end. I suppose a challenge would be to play the game and get to the end without jumping that much… but there’s no achievement for that so who cares.

The majority of the others are awarded for picking up the small amount of collectibles in each of the sets of levels. There are only two collectibles per set so it’s not onerous and they are pretty obvious once you know what you are looking for.

Outside of this, there are two other achievements, one for jumping on the block called Laura 100 times (I think this is supposed to be some kind of weird joke that doesn’t come off) and another for dying 100 times and while the game isn’t overly difficult, this one won’t take much grinding.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I want to say that Thomas Was Alone is worth playing for the gameplay if you can get past the fact the title is a lie and the game is filled with utter bollocks in terms of dialogue. It’s a little on the pricey side for its length though.