Imagine if every character in your favourite movie was replaced by a series of simple, coloured shapes and a narrator who explains what they’re thinking and doing. You’d hate it, right? Now imagine that but you have to play a poorly-coded Tetris clone the entire time. That’s the essence of the critically acclaimed indie darling Thomas Was Alone, a game so far up its own digestive tract that it could only be enjoyed by the least interested of obnoxious pre-teens.
I’m being hyperbolic, of course: Thomas Was Alone is actually meant for people who work for BAFTA and can only enjoy a video game if every element unique to games has been stripped out or simplified to the level of a child’s puzzle and instead crammed with a half-baked narrative that tries to analyse complex philosophical concepts by hiring somebody who sounds British enough to be popular enough on YouTube.
It’s the crudest, most basic level of interactive storytelling, where the interaction is the kind of shitty platformer you make in a high school game design class and the storytelling is an annoying, totally separate piece of work that clobbers you over the head with lazy writing and the thinnest of metaphors. There are so many games that do a good job of telling a story within an actual game that I don’t know why you’d settle for something as overblown and pretentious as Thomas Was Alone, which only pretends to be interested in doing that.
Dylan's Morsels 