Thomas Was Alone (PS4) Review

 

Thomas Was Alone (PS4) Review

Date Released: 25 November 2014

Date Played: Summer 2017

Introduction:

There's a famous quote about the rock band, The Velvet Underground, that basically says, "The Velvet Underground only sold about 2000 albums, but every person that bought that album started their own band."  Thus, you end up having one of the most influential bands of all time despite a lackluster initial reception.  I feel like Thomas Was Alone is the Velvet Underground of the indie game scene.  The general population looks on the game with a general fondness and it received some good praise from the critics.  But, the people that loved this game... really loved it.  Several reviewers I watched online talked about how it changed their life and inspired them to become game developers. Others claimed it changed the way that they viewed video games and even personal relationships in their life.  Even Youtube megastar, PewDiePie, said it was his favorite indie game of all time in one video.  Regardless of how you feel about the game, there's certainly a certain mystique surrounding it that can be rather polarizing. It's an important entry in the indie game scene for sure and even gamers who have no desire to play it should at least be made aware of its existence and the ideas that it tries to address.

Thomas Was Alone was originally a Flash-based browser game that was later turned into a more complete package and ported to almost every platform out there.  Mike Bithell, the creator, wanted to create a game that was strikingly simple in its presentation but had both a compelling narrative and fun gameplay to round out the package. Danny Wallace, the humorist, was brought in to perform the game's important narration and to give the game an overall somber feel while still providing a healthy does of British dry wit. The whole package is designed to focus on the feelings and aspirations of the cast and is more of a character study over its other elements.

Story, Themes, Gameplay, and Presentation:

When you boil it all down, Thomas Was Alone is a puzzle platformer that is focused on the concept of loneliness.  You begin as Thomas, the titular protagonist of the game, and he is... alone.  Represented by nothing more than a simple rectangle, you control Thomas with the analog stick and only have the ability to jump in side-scrolling fashion. In each level, your objective is to get Thomas into a portal that is represented by a white outline of his body. The stages start out very simply in the beginning and become more and more complex and difficult as you progress through the game's chapters. All the while, you'll be listening to the fantastically delivered narration that describes Thomas' feelings, motivations, and objectives.  Despite only being a rectangle, Thomas has a pretty well developed personality for a video game character and it's very easy for the player to sympathize with his plight.

Along the way, you meet other characters represented by other quadrilaterals who have their own personalities, motivations, and weaknesses.  As they become Thomas' companions, you all begin to work together to solve the more and more increasingly complex puzzles and it won't be long until you're wracking your brain trying to figure out how to get each of these pieces into their respective portals to finish the stage.  Switching between the various characters is done with the simple press of a button and they will all usually have to assist each other by providing a height boost, serving as a floating platform, or by sneaking through at tight space where the other pieces are ill-suited for that particular task.  Over the course of the game's 3-5 hour length, you'll have many mechanics introduced to you to throw more and more complexity into the game's workings.  You'll encounter timing puzzles, deadly spikes, trampolines, and all other manner of hinderances to impede your progress.  Dying is common, but luckily, you respawn immediately so the game never becomes too tedious.  You will, however, need to bring your thinking cap and at least some modicum of platforming skills.  

The overall story involves the characters being escaped A.I. components that have escaped from a computer program or some other such nonsense. Everyone is trying reach something called the Emergence which is where they become actual entities rather than existing as only computer code. There are other AIs that act as antagonists and attempt to reach the Emergence before Thomas and his friends or to derail their progress.  It's honestly and overly convoluted plot for such a simple looking game and really only serves as a basis for the player to work through the emotional and conceptual themes surrounding the game.  Lonliness, friendship, betrayal, support, trust, and many other concepts are the real focus of the game and are what makes it stand out in my memory.

The visual style of the game is extremely basic with mostly dark blue, purple, and black backgrounds that have an austere presentation.  As mentioned earlier, the characters themselves are nothing more than colored geometric shapes (despite their much more developed personalities and desires).  The game doesn't really need fancy graphics and it was a very wise idea to intentionally tone down the visual presentation in order to make the concepts the game attempts to hammer home much more impactful.  A lot of flash isn't needed when your puzzles, mechanics, and themes are this well done.  

Another spot where this game truly shines is in its masterful use of music. Having a computer program represented by a rectangle as your main character and giving it a large host of human emotions that the gamer is supposed to empathize with is a difficult bridge to gap; and the perfectly blended artificial chip-tune sounds with actual instruments such as guitar, piano, and orchestral strings echo this sentiment extremely well.  Sometimes, the soundtrack is unobtrusive and minimalistic to give a relaxed mood and at other times it becomes heavy and pensive to accentuate the intensity that's building in the gameplay.  It encompasses a huge range of emotions and flows masterfully along with the narrative developments in the game. In my opinion, the game is carried by its soundtrack and would not have been able to convey it's ideas without it.

Conclusion:

Thomas Was Alone is a very important game that has continued to maintain its reputation as an indie darling for over a decade.  I feel that it succeeds in it's attempts to have a good puzzle game that deals with strong human emotions but presents everything in a very minimalistic manner.  It's a worthwhile journey to take, albeit a little sad and melancholy for large parts of its duration. The narration and characters are all very likeable and quite memorable.  Even several years, and a few hundred games played in interim before returning to this game, I had a good recollection of Thomas and his friends and looked back on them fondly.

Sadly, unlike many other puzzle based games, this one doesn't really have the addictive sort of gameplay that you are normally expecting and it instead serves as a sort of background task you're attempting to complete while you listen to the narration and try to put yourself into the mental mindset of Thomas and his companions. This is typically the modus operandi of any puzzle platformer that you will encounter, so it was to be expected. If I had to give you the too long, didn't read impression of this game I would say that Thomas Was Alone is very much a one-and-done sort of game, and I would highly recommend it to someone who is a fan of games that are more thought provoking rather than mechanically focused.  I had a good time with it, but once it was over, it isn't something I'm really craving coming back to visit anytime soon.

Final Status: Completed (game beaten and all trophies earned)

Final Score: 7/10 

Xevious (NES) Review

 

Xevious (NES) Review

Release Date: September 1988

Date Played: 16 January 2022

Introduction:

Xevious is an early and highly influential vertical shmup developed and released by Namco to arcades in 1982. Although it is very primitive and simple by today's standards, it laid the ground work and invented many of the common elements we see in shmups to this day. It was then ported to every console and computer under the sun and was extremely prolific in the pop culture scene of the time. The NES version, released in 1988, is fairly true to the arcade version and is a decent port that I am choosing to review here today. 

Hardcore Gaming 101's publication, Guide to Shoot 'em Ups Vol. 3 Devotes nine entire pages to the original Xevious game while every other game in the guide has 2-3 pages on average. You can tell that they considered the game to be extremely important and worthy of so much reflection and even chose to begin then entire volume with this game despite it's title falling last alphabetically. It's a very important entry in the history of video games and I feel like the title is well known to pretty much every gamer out there even if they haven't played it. Although it has faded from popularity over the years and has a very basic gameplay structure, it is one of the most important shooters every made and is still very addictive and remains a bona fide classic.

Story and Legacy:

Much like many of the games that came in the early 80s, there is no in-game story to speak of. Instead, the story is usually pieced together from outside sources like the game's instruction manual.  In the case of Xevious, there was a pop culture boom centered around the game and it led to the creation of comics, artwork, novels, cartoons, and even a terrible and very rare animated movie.  I won't get too deep into the lore of the game and it's overly complex and oddly fleshed out story here because there just isn't enough room... and, honestly, it's a little embarrassing that so much effort was put into the background of such a simple and seemingly superficial game. But, I will give a brief synopsis to whet your whistle. 

Basically, from what I can piece together, there was an alien race who populated Earth long before the humans.  A catastrophic event was about to occur, so they fled the planet to find a new home.  Eons later, humanity had taken its place on Earth and was living its normal life when the ancient aliens decided to return.  Before their arrival, a bunch of their technology started sprouting up from the ground in anticipation of their return and wiped out mankind. You play as the pilot of the Solvalou ship and return to Earth to find it completely overrun by the aliens.  So, you do what any good pilot does and you start blasting them to kingdom come while trying to save the world. While even this small synopsis seems like huge overkill for the game, I encourage you to do your own quick internet search and dive into the hilariously complex background story of Xevious.  It's honestly quite shocking.

From all of the pop culture references, story, and insane amount of ports, it's easy to see that the world was enamored with this game. You may ask yourself why this is the case because it's just a simple game where you shoot stuff and there's a million just like it. After some research, you'll soon learn that Xevious introduced several huge developments that were milestones in the gaming world.  Firstly, Xevious was the first game with a vertically scrolling screen.  Up until this point, everything just took place on a static screen like Space Invaders and the backgrounds never moved.  It was also the first shooter to have a background that was anything more than a black screen or starfield.  The developers had to create terrain and different locations in the game to make the player feel like they were going somewhere as the screen was scrolling by.  It's a simple idea, but was revolutionary at the time.  If that weren't enough, the game also introduced the concept of gameplay secrets into the industry. There are hidden towers and other various secret scoring mechanics and 1UPs scattered around for you to discover by bombing certain locations on the map.  This added another element to the already addictive gameplay and caused many an arcade goer to pump extra coins into the machine to try to find all of the secrets that they could.  This, of course, led every other video game company out there to add secrets to their games to inject some much needed novelty to the whole experience.  

If this weren't enough in terms of ground breaking mechanics, Xevious was also one of the first games to introduce the concept of a Boss Fight.  Before this point, games just had more and more progressively harder enemies.  But, this game introduced 4 giant fortresses that you have to stop and battle before you're allowed to continue.  Of course, I don't need to tell you how influential this was to games in the future.  If you've ever played one, you know.

I think I've made my case for how important this game was... and still is.  It took the world by storm and in addition to all of those other "firsts" it still has one more...

Xevious was the first video game to ever have a TV commercial advertising it. No wonder it was a huge success.

Presentation:

In the modern age of 4k gaming and photorealistic graphics, Xevious isn't much to look at.  This was, after all, a game created in the early days and what you see in the screenshots are what you get.  You fly over grassy fields with brown roads.  There's the occasional river, tarmac, desert, and forest thrown in here and there.  But, the whole experience is very monotonous and seems to have only 5 or 6 colors used in the entire game. Other than the enemies and trees, nothing has any texture to it and appears to just be flat and basic shapes. It's par for the course at the time, but doesn't hold up very well anymore.  The game takes place in South America, which is a cool setting for a game, but you would never know it unless you're able to progress far into the game and start seeing the Nazcal Lines in the background.  It's a nice touch and is a memorable part of the game, I only wish that it was introduced earlier in the experience.  Some early variety in the setting would have been a nice touch.

To accompany the gameplay you're given a memorable but bizarre soundtrack.  The startup music is very catchy and fun even if it only lasts about 4 seconds.  However, the music during gameplay is a fever dream of dissonant and seemingly random patterns of 16th notes played in a loop.  It's one of the worst songs I've ever heard in a game to be so prominently featured.  It's grating to the ears and induces a sort of anxiety when you hear it similar to a kid just banging out random notes on a piano at full volume while you're trying to have a conversation with his parents in the same room.  I normally play all of my games with a surround sound setup, and I had to literally disconnect it to play this game because it was so painful to endure.  Not only that, the NES port pauses the music every single time an explosion occurs.  Meaning, that whenever you shoot an enemy, there is a hiccup in the music.  It's such an incredibly bad experience in the sound department that it almost ruins the whole experience. I would advise you to play with the sound turned off.

Gameplay:

While Xevious was basically one of the founding fathers of the genre and created a lot of the mechanics and tropes we still see in the genre, it's gameplay really just boils down to a basic vertical shmup.  You have your ship at the bottom of the screen and you have freedom of motion to move on both the x and y axes.  You have a basic shot and there are no powerups.  In addition to this, you have a reticule set a fixed distance in front of your ship and you can use it to target and bomb enemies on the ground.  I'm not sure if Xevious was the first game to ever use this idea in a vertical shmup (I know Scramble did it in a horizontal shmup), but I always refer to this mechanic as the Xevious Bombing Mechanic in all my other reviews as it's probably the best known example of this.  Other games like the Twin Bee series, Dragon Spirit, and Layer Section all borrow and use this mechanic as well and it's a somewhat common feature in a lot of storied game series. Unfortunately, I feel like it forces you to have to focus your gameplay onto two planes simultaneously and takes away from the fun inherent in the simple nature of a shmup.  You'll have to bomb installations, tanks, and turrets on the ground while also dealing with the onslaught of aerial enemies that come in several different varieties.  They are all very simple visually (some are just a black ball, or a disc, or a basic rocket ship) but have challenging and difficult attack patterns you'll have to memorize. Some can be very annoying like the previously mentioned black balls that seem to vanish right as you're about to shoot them or the tiny enemies that suicide bomb you at lightning fast speed. There is a primitive ranking system that will send different patterns of enemies at you based on how well you're doing or if you've died recently.  It can keep you on your toes and make it difficult to learn the game, but you'll start recognizing the enemy's behavior before too long and will get the swing of things.  In addition to the air and land enemies, there are the aforementioned boss fights which are all identical and involve surviving and huge barrage of bullets from the enemy base until you can bomb its core and advance. 

There are no individual stages in the game and is instead an unending and continual scrolling experience broken up into 16 sections.  These sections try to be varied somewhat with different background layouts and enemy patters, but still come across as repetitive due to the reuse of gaming assets. They are at least broken up by patches of forest that signify their starting and ending points. If you don't have the game memorized, you'll have to manually count these sections to figure out how far you've progressed into the 30min long 1st loop of the game.  If you die you're sent back to the beginning of the section you were currently on (sigh...).  Luckily, if you're cleared 70% of the section, the game takes pity on you and starts you at a checkpoint towards the end.  This is a nice mechanic that I enjoy, but would have preferred respawning right where you die.  Since there are no powerups, you don't really need a checkpoint system other than to frustrate the gamer (and I guess get more quarters in the arcade) and pad out the experience.  The game is pretty fair with its extends and you'll earn an extra life at 20k points and then every 40k after that. With the hidden 1UPs scattered around you can stockpile plenty of lives.

Despite this, the game is still very tough and can seem a bit unfair and unbalanced at times. Many times you'll play for 15 minutes and make it half way through the 16 sections without ever getting hit a single time only to hit a seemingly impossible section where you die over and over again before hitting a game over. Not only are there these huge difficulty spikes, there are also long and boring sections that require almost no effort and you'll just be sitting there not really doing anything other than dodging the occasional indestructible and oblivious enemy.  The game really needs some balancing tweaks and I think these were addressed in the many remakes and sequels to the original.

Once you clear the 16 sections, the game infinitely loops by taking you back to section 7 with an increased difficulty.  There's no real ending to the game and the final goal is to continue to play until the score reaches its max score of 9,999,990 which is much easier said than done.

Conclusion:

Xevious is still a lot of fun to plan and can be quite addictive despite its tedious nature both in terms of gameplay and presentation.  I don't personally like the ground bombing mechanic in shmups because it forces you to position yourself in precarious places in order to hit ground units and makes you have to split your attention between two playfields.  Quite often, as is the case in the Twinbee franchise, this can almost ruin a game for me.  However, in the case of Xevious, everything is so basic and uncluttered that the ground bombing mechanic, while not very likable to me, is still tolerable and does add some much needed variety to the game.  The backgrounds, while revolutionary for the time, are very boring and all seem to blend together and make the while experience even more repetitive.  Couple this with the insane and ear destroying music, and you have a recipe for a shmup that most modern gamers aren't going to want to put any effort into learning.  The extreme difficulty spikes interspersed between long and boring sections only serves to mix an element of frustration into the tedium that really hurts the game overall.  

The game pretty much created the vertical shmup genre as we know it.  It's highly beloved and influential but seems to be the case of an important game where other's stood on its shoulders to create something truly remarkable.  James Naismith might have invented the game of basketball, but you won't hear him mentioned in any lists of the greatest players of all time along side the likes of Michael Jordon, Kobe Bryant, or LeBron James.  I feel like this analogy is a good representation of where Xevious stands in the annuls of shmup history.  

Don't get me wrong, everyone should still play it.  But, I doubt very few modern gamers are going to fall in love with this game if they didn't already have nostalgia for it.

Final Status: Played (can't really be beaten... 5 hours invested)

Final Score: 6/10 (still a little fun)