Thomas Was Alone PS3/Vita Review

Thomas Was Alone PS3/Vita Review - IGN Image

Posted

: Apr 22, 2013 11:10am GMT+1

Thomas Was Alone does an incredible thing: it makes you care about characters that are nothing more than coloured rectangles. It’s a great example of the way decent writing can elevate the simplest of games to something really memorable. As a puzzle-platformer, Thomas Was Alone is unique and entertaining, but it’s the confluence of art, sound, characterisation and gameplay that makes it something more.Coming to PS3 and Vita after a successful launch on PC last year, Thomas Was Alone is one of the first fruits of Sony’s renewed courtship of independent developers. 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. 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.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. 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. Some are devious, some cantankerous, some mildly evil, but most are pleasant characters reacting with mild bemusement to their newfound consciousness. 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.

It’s just as good on Sony’s platforms as it was on PC – indeed, like many platformers, it’s more comfortably played with a controller. It’s best on Vita, which most ably showcases both the bite-sized level structure and the sparse but high-quality presentation. It benefits from a few extra visual flourishes and effects over last year's release, too - although the way that the subtitle text adapts itself to what's on-screen makes it harder to read than a static paragraph.

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. 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. Some levels are more tedious than others – the ones that involve a lot of precise staircasing and dangerous jumps will make you death-grip your Vita or PS3 controller 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. 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.

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. Its use of colour and shadow, too, elevates it aesthetically from what you might expect of a one-man game at this price point. 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.

Thomas Was Alone never over-exploits any of its ideas, giving each the space it needs to breathe; if there’s a particular type of level that infuriates you, you can be happy in the knowledge that you won’t have to play through 20 near-identical ones. This does lead to a relatively short run-time, but the £5.99 ($9) purchase price is still more than justified by the overall quality of the experience.

Verdict

Thomas Was Alone sells itself as “a minimalist game about jumping and friendship” – and unlike most slogans, this one doesn’t overstate itself. I can say with reasonable confidence that it is the most endearingly characterful game about jumping rectangles that you will ever play. The understated aesthetic design and unusual co-op puzzles will absorb you for the game’s duration – the wit and personality of the writing, though, will stay with you for much longer.