I'm always on the lookout for games that seem to be doing something unique, and Thomas Was Alone seems to have gotten near-universal acclaim. I can sort of see how the simplistic graphics and gameplay, chiptune soundtrack, and cutesy story would have appealed to certain people, but I'm astounded that any non-Candy Crush playing gamer would have given this anything but a low rating. I'm not even the most hardcore of gamers, but I found the gameplay to be monumentally dull. The game purports to be a sort of puzzle platformer, but the puzzles are completely simple and repetitive; the puzzles in the first third of the game pretty much all just involve simple variations of making a staircase by moving the small block to the top of the medium block to the top of the tall block so it can reach a platform it can't otherwise reach. This simplicity is carried through the other types of blocks that are introduced, and I ended up quitting at about the halfway point because my brain cells were committing suicide in droves.
The other part of the game that is generally praised is the story, which I also found to be incredibly simplistic. The "gimmick" of the narrative is that the game personifies all the blocks and gives them names and personalities, but the relationships between them are all at a complete elementary-school level. "Charles likes Laura", "Laura likes Charles", blah blah blah. The game gave me no compelling reason to feel any interest in the characters, and since the story and the gameplay were supposedly the two main selling points of the game I definitely felt I'd had enough and really didn't see the need to continue bore myself.
This ended up being a short experience, but I guess there's just not accounting for popular taste. Here's hoping that my next indie experience isn't as targeted toward elementary school kids. :p
Some not too boring Thomas Was Alone links:
- Official site
- Glowing review on NintendoLife
- Entry on Wikipedia