Thomas Was Alone

The Good
All the story is delivered by an extremely talented narrator.

The graphics are very clean and easy to read.

The Bad
Thomas Was Alone is a multi-character puzzle platformer: each character has different abilities and it's up to the players to find out how to make them interact with each other so that they can reach the end of the levels. It's not an original concept, but possibly a solid theme that could work. Unfortunately in this case it doesn't. There isn't enough meat to make the gameplay interesting, because most of the levels are uninspired and require little to no thinking. Only the final two chapters present some kind of challenge and interesting design. In most cases the level design revolves around carrying all available characters forward until an obstacle that can only be crossed by some of them is found. Those characters will then proceed to look for a device to open the way to the ones left behind, and so forth, until the game is over.

While the game certainly isn't hard, its controls try their best to make it so. To start it all, if you're using a gamepad, natively only the analog stick is supported for movement. It is understandable for people who play with Microsoft's Xbox 360 controllers, but since there exist options with decent d-pads on PC it's unacceptable to be limited to analog controls in a 2D game. The jumping feels extremely stiff and unresponsive, and in general the movement is quite buggy, with characters sticking to walls and having abnormal behaviour whenever they're on moving platforms.

The graphics, while I said they're clean, are not good at all. Some people might want to call these “retro”, but they go beyond that. There is no style to them, it's just coloured squares and rectangles.

The selling point of the game is supposed to be the story, so I've heard. As I mentioned, it's delivered by a fantastic narrator, and that helps. I personally didn't find the plot overwhelmingly good, but that's not the problem: the pace at which it was delivered is pretty poor. A lot of the narrative is cramped together, creating moments of overwhelming amounts of information opposed to others where nothing happens.

It should've perhaps been among the positive notes, given my overall feelings on the game, the fact that it certainly doesn't overstay its welcome: in three and a half hours I was able to complete the game and all of its achievements, including the two bonus chapters that, while promising at first, end up being unremarkable like the rest.

The Bottom Line
I understand what they were trying to do with this game, but to me it just didn't work. Neither the gameplay nor the story gripped me and, while it was an amazing pleasure to my ears, the narrator alone can't save this. I found no redeeming features that would make me want to not give it a completely negative rating.