Mike Bithell’s debut still makes players feel things about coloured rectangles 14 years on.

Mike Bithell built Thomas Was Alone out of rectangles. No faces, no voices of their own, no textures worth the name. The 2012 puzzle-platformer asks you to care about coloured quadrilaterals, and then makes you do it. It first appeared as a Flash-based browser game in October 2010, was expanded and released for Microsoft Windows and OS X in June 2012, and has since landed on Linux, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Wii U, iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch.

Trailer, via Mike Bithell.

A Red Rectangle Named Thomas

The game takes place inside a computer mainframe. An unspecified “Event” has caused several artificial intelligence routines to run out of control and gain personality. Each one perceives its digital world as 2D space and itself as a shape. The eponymous character, Thomas-AT-23-6-12, is a red rectangle. He is curious and observant, and he starts to travel through his internal world looking for his own purpose and perhaps companionship.

He is not alone in there. He meets Chris, who is cynical. He meets John, who shows off. He meets Claire, who calls herself a superhero. He meets Laura, who is apprehensive and does not want to join the crew, because a black “pixel cloud” has been following her.

The Pixel Cloud and the Splitter

The pixel cloud attacks and eats all five of them. It turns out to be a “splitter”, a mechanism that tries to fix the fact that multiple AIs are being placed in the same virtual space by mistake. James, an AI who falls upwards instead of down, frees Thomas from the splitter’s virtual prison.

James and Thomas meet Sarah, a purple AI, who tells them about “the fountain of wisdom” — the system’s Internet uplink. Only Thomas can access it. He connects for twelve seconds, creating a “network connection spike” that humans later misidentify as the moment Thomas became self-aware. He learns about the outside world, rescues his four friends, and tells them what he found.

Danny Wallace Does the Talking

The shapes cannot be heard. A narrator describes the personalities and thoughts of each one as the game goes on, and that narrator is Danny Wallace. His performance earned Thomas Was Alone a BAFTA Games Award. It is the single best decision in the game.

Wallace carries the whole emotional load. Strip him out and you are pushing coloured blocks around for a few hours. With him, a red rectangle’s search for purpose lands harder than most games manage with a full cast of animated humans.

Staircases Made of Friends

The mechanics are as spare as the art. All shapes can move left and right across platforms and jump, but jump height varies by shape, and some have other abilities — one can float on water. When you control two or more, you switch freely between them, one at a time.

Every level has exit points tied to specific shapes. All of them must occupy their exits at the same time. So a shape that cannot jump high gets a staircase built from other shapes. The shape that floats ferries the rest across water. A shape lost to a hazard reappears at the start of the level, or at a checkpoint if it passed one. There are ten sets of levels, usually introducing a new character, with ten levels in each set.

A Twelve-Second Connection

Thomas Was Alone is about friendship and jumping and floating and anti-gravity, and it is not shy about the friendship part. The story runs on the world’s first sentient AIs and how they worked together to — well, not escape. Escape is a strong word. “Emerge” might be better.

The plot earns its turns. Thomas learns of the outside world in twelve seconds and comes back with a plan: become an “architect”, someone who can modify his world and empower other AIs to do the same. He and his friends enter the “creation matrix”, the generator of the world, and disappear.

What the Rectangles Get Right

Here is what matters. Thomas Was Alone does with almost nothing what most platformers cannot do with everything. The shapes have no faces, so the writing and Wallace’s delivery have to do all the work, and they do.

The puzzle design is the weaker half. Ten sets of ten levels is a lot of rooms, and the abilities are few: jump height, floating, falling up. The game introduces a character, teaches you the trick, and repeats it. Chris and John and Claire and Laura each arrive with a personality and an ability, and the levels rarely push either past the first good idea.

The splitter is the best stretch. It gives the game an actual antagonist, and it gives Thomas something to lose.

Release Timeline

That spread is worth noting. A game built from rectangles and narration has been ported to nearly every platform going, which says something about how well the core idea holds up.

His performance earned the game a BAFTA Games Award.

The BAFTA is the tell. Thomas Was Alone is remembered for its voice, not its jumping. The puzzles are competent and the story is better than competent, and the gap between those two things is the whole review. Play it for the twelve seconds Thomas spends on the Internet and for what Wallace does with a red rectangle. Do not play it expecting the levels to surprise you twice.

Danny Wallace · game review · Indie Games · Mike Bithell · puzzle platformer · Thomas Was Alone