WeView Verdict: Thomas Was Alone

Thomas was loved. There wasn’t many negative judgements in this week’s WeView comments section, with a pretty much unanimous air of positivity surrounding this week’s verdict. So, let’s get on with the round-up, starting first with the negativity, so we can get that out of the way.

yd was the first to highlight the problem with Thomas – “it’s far too easy”, continuing with “Every time you’re introduced to a new friend, you’re just getting used to how it works and what fiendish challenges it could lead to, and then another new friend pops up and it gets easy again.” It seems that his complaint is with how it cuts each section short, before it gets a chance to ramp up the difficulty.

It was tactical20 who took this a bit further, blaming “poor level design” as the reason for it being “just far too easy and therefore way too short”. Overall, he found it “a pretty disappointing experience” considering the full price of the game.

Tuffcub retorted to these claims of low difficulty by saying that “it’s easy, but so was Journey” before pointing out how the game “achieved the impossible and made me like Danny Wallace.” The narration was praised elsewhere, with ron_mcphatty describing it as “absolutely wonderful” while seravok told us how it “even made me chuckle out loud a few times, only to make the sad and boring people on the train raise a eyebrow at me.”

Dan Jones said that “Danny Wallace’s narration made it the game it was”, and that the Vita version was the one to go for. Tarbun84 thought the same, with the “simple but engrossing gameplay” being a perfect fit for the system.

Unfortunately, Taylor Made didn’t have a chance to play the game due to his wife becoming addicted to it. She completed the game 100% and even bought the DLC! That’s dedication to Thomas! jbni also sounded quite addicted to the game, completing it on the same night as he got it, describing it as “one of the few recent games that has actually left me feeling happy”, while lambchop said it was “oresome” and I’m still trying to work out if that’s a pun of some kind or a wild typo.

Avenger‘s comment summed it all up nicely:

It’s a solid game with a strong story reinforced by the philosophy of becoming sentient, learning, exploring a new world, and encountering entities different than you; basically it’s an essence of life in a distinct visual approach, with great narration.

All of that’s great, but it’s in game form. Therefore it would’ve been nice for more complex puzzles and game-play. Instead it got tiring towards the end; flicking between squares and moving them one at a time.

So, that’s it for Thomas. Maybe he’ll make a cameo in Mike Bithell’s new game, Volume. All in all, Thomas Was Alone received a massive 14 votes for Buy It, just three votes for Sale It and only a single vote for Avoid It.

Tomorrow, we’ve got The Last of Us on WeView, so we’ll see how well that fares, but as for next week, you can vote for the poll above and along with LittleBigPlanet Karting and Resistance: Burning Skies, we’ve got two new games, in the form of Dead Island: Riptide and Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Sorry if they don’t sound tantalising, but we’re running out of games that we haven’t already done!