In the interest of time, of which I seem to have little recently, this one's going to be brief. This is fitting, I think, given the game I'll be talking about this time.
In the wake of getting a new computer, I also picked up a modest pile of games. One might call it humble. At any rate, one of these piles was actually donated to me by +Daxten Reiter, in some sort of crazy "charity" thing, wherein the proceeds benefit "philanthropic" organizations. At any rate, among these was a game that caught my attention while reviewing my new prize.
What caught my attention the most was a light British accent commenting on Kryptonite. The pieces of a planet rather than the actual element. The game is Thomas Was Alone, a game about rectangles (of all dimensions, including squares). It's a short game, and I've played some Flash games on a certain site that are equally ambitious, though lesser in their implementation.
Basically, your rectangles represent the corporeal forms of newly aware artificial intelligences, a pile of self-generating code that accidentally became sentient. The first of these was the eponymous Thomas, a rectangle of middling abilities and a rather empiric bent. Because the game is short, and reasonably cheap, I'll skip a lot of the details that make the game.
The boring part, the mechanics, are rather simple. It's a platformer with fairly simple puzzles, most of which involve coercing your pointy minions into various formations so as to allow the lot of you to reach the outlined portals at the end of a stage, conveniently shaped for each of your polygonal friends. You jump, mostly, and certain of your companions move in special ways, one functioning as a trampoline and another as a barge.
What really takes this game from being mediocre to enjoyable and compelling is the narration. As I mentioned, you have an English accent describing the thoughts and motivations of all these squares to you. You begin to see Thomas's fervor for knowledge, Chris's general disgruntlement, John's conceit over his superior... athleticism. Over the course of the game, which will run you around 6 hours, you become quite attached to these little shapes.
There are even some heart-wrenching moments. Over rectangles. Seriously.
It's quirky and a bit funny, which, as I've often said, can make a game much brighter in my memory. The music's fantastic, too. It mostly goes unnoticed, but on occasion you will sit and mull over a puzzle and the sound of it hits you like a refreshing breeze, lending some frivolity to your machinations or some gloom to your joy, depending on where in the game you are.
The game is split up into chapters, though you mostly won't notice them going by. Each chapter, however, is prepended with a statement from a former staff member at the company that accidentally created our lovable shapes, setting the tone for that chapter. Later in the game, there's some remarkable foreshadowing to reinforce the game's moral. Which, as far as I have gathered, is that teamwork is awesome and we should totally make some functioning A.I.s.
While I have said it is reasonably cheap, it runs $10 on Steam, which is more than I would have paid for it. There exist some pretty awesome free games that address similar concepts almost as ably, lacking only the voiced narration. I don't think that's a good reason to snub this one, though, and I definitely enjoyed it.
The long and short of this is, if you have some time to kill over a weekend or something and feel like exploring a strange and vast world through the... vertices of a newly sentient block of pixels, I would recommend picking this one up. It feels good the whole way through. It raises your expectations, defies them, and, ultimately, gives you the happy ending you wanted.
No comments:
Post a Comment