At times, it can almost be hypnotic in conjunction with the narration and the excellent level design. The sound effects are simple digital beeps, while the music is an extremely ambient affair. With the exception of the narration, the audio design is very simple. While there repetition of some types of platforming, almost every level feels unique and fresh. There are 100 levels in the base game, plus the levels in the Benjamin’s Flight expansion that comes packaged with the Wii U version. And it’s very impressive that this is the case. There’s no one off plan that will get them through every level. The player has to think differently for every situation. This means the tools at the player’s disposal are constantly being shuffled. There isn’t any one character that appears in all puzzles and most puzzles exclude at least a couple characters. The puzzles are a lot of fun and the game constant shuffles the characters the player can use to keep things interesting. I’d love to see more games with this kind of humor. There’s even a “cake is a lie” reference. His lines are peppered with self-aware humor and references to the game being a game, as well as gaming in jokes. The narrator, played by Danny Wallace, is incredibly entertaining and comes off like he’s reading a book to a class of children.
It is told purely through equally self-aware narration that reminds me greatly of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In terms of narrative, the story starts when Thomas becomes self-aware and it explores how each of the characters interact with each other. Most of the puzzles require the rectangles to avoid water as only Clair, a large blue square, can touch the water without dying and almost all of them require using the characters as platforms to get them where they need to be. Each of the characters have, as the game puts it, “very different relationships with gravity.” Thomas is a small rectangle with a decent jump, John is a tall yellow rectangle with a large jump, Laura is a long horizontal rectangle that the other characters bounce off of and so on and so forth. The titular Thomas being a red vertical rectangle, for instance. Thomas Was Alone is a puzz le game about self-aware AIs that are represented by colored rectangles. What I got was a surprisingly compelling, if basic, exercise in storytelling. I was expecting a puzzle platformer alone the lines of Curve Digital’s previous outings, including The Swapper and Stealth Inc.
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