Thomas Was Alone

Stan recently posted about Thomas Was Alone, and the game is so short and straight-forward that I don't have much to elaborate on. It's extremely minimalist, as you simply navigate squares and rectangles around through quick puzzles while a British narrator gives the shapes voice and personality, as well as a storyline. It's over in a couple hours, and a hundred levels, and while it doesn't beat out Braid for my favorite indie game, it's certainly worth a play. To make this post worthwile, I'll go a little more in depth on the gameplay itself. You start off with one little rectangle, Thomas, and for the first ten levels Thomas is indeed alone. He simply moves back and forth and jumps pretty high until he lands in his own little rectangular exit-hole. Eventually Thomas meets another rectangle, Chris, one who's a little smaller and can't jump as high as him. This introduces the fourth and final necessary control, as a button push allows you to switch between which shape you want to control. This is also when the narration really started to get fun, as you learn Chris seriously resents how low his jump is in comparison with Thomas, and pretty quickly these generic monochrome shapes develop very human personalities. As you move forward you get shapes with varying properties- ones that can double-jump, or float in water, or let players bounce high off of them like a trampoline, and more. Eventually you've got a decent-sized crew of shapes working together to get out of whatever weird set of puzzles/experiments they've found themselves in. Credit's due to the game for having some challenging puzzles at the end but not giving a ridiculous difficulty curve that so many games have to pad out their length. I liked Thomas Was Alone plenty, but I probably won't invest in the DLC. Not any time soon, at least.