At least the music is stunning – soothing electronica that I really enjoyed. The narration here by comedian Danny Wallace definitely gives life to Thomas Was Alone but also serves to stifle it somewhat – the fact it’s constant throughout nearly everything you do proves to ultimately be quite exhausting. With that said, it runs well, the menus are stylish and there’s a calm relaxing theme running throughout the game which definitely benefits it. While there are little flourishes of interest in levels like water effects or the ominous pixel cloud that follows Laura around, in general there’s nothing to write home about here – it’s just coloured shapes on mostly block coloured backgrounds without much else to make it stand out. There’s a limit to what you can do with coloured blocks and plain backgrounds and Thomas Was Alone hits this limit – it’s fine, but nothing more than this. It’s just a shame that it fell completely flat for me – I’d have preferred it to be less cryptic and more overt with what it’s going for. I have to commend Thomas Was Alone for not only being a 2D platformer that attempts to tell a story, but one that tries something different along the way. It’s interspersed by quotes from ‘Artificial Life Solutions’, a fictional company behind the experimentation with AI’s but again this was a framing device that didn’t mean much to me without context. It’s bold but sadly the way it’s delivered really didn’t work for me – without the explanations I read online I’d have struggled to keep up and it feels like it’s trying to be edgy without any real substance. The overarching plot is also unique, in that it focuses on a meta narrative involving the shapes being AI’s within a computer mainframe who learn of their own existence and hatch a plan to change their world. Certainly it’s a brave stab at something unconventional that offers a very unique experience. It’s quite bizarre – and oddly it does work somewhat as you do form a connection with them along the way, although the script often goes for humour but comes across as trying too hard which makes it difficult to fully engage with. The immediate thing you’ll notice with Thomas Was Alone is that through Danny Wallace’s narration, the game attempts to create characterisation for a group of otherwise lifeless blocks and for you to empathise with them. Along the way he meets a variety of other shapes – from the grumpy square Chris to the somewhat delusional Claire and together they start a journey to break free from their confines. A coloured block named Thomas finds himself alone in the world, required to go through a series of puzzle areas to find the teleporter at the end to move onto the next level.
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