A screenshot of the game Thomas Was Alone, showing various geometric shapes in an abstract environment.

Screenshot from Thomas Was Alone. A yellow rectangle navigating spikes. Simplistic platformer.

A rectangular character drops into the minimalist platform of the game Thomas Was Alone on a dark background.

A screenshot from the game Thomas Was Alone. A blue cuboid is in the center. Yellow and black pixels surround it. The background is dark.

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An award-winning and critically-acclaimed indie game, Thomas Was Alone is a 2D puzzle platformer about shapes and friendship. In this story, A.I. company Artificial Life Solutions created several intelligent programs, only for these to suddenly turn sentient. Each A.I. is represented as a rectangular shape and perceives its world as a series of zany puzzles and obstacles. One shape, a curious red rectangle dubbed Thomas, tries to find the meaning of his existence and travels the world of his mainframe, meeting and working with all the other A.I. along the way.

A minimalist game, all the characters in Thomas Was Alone are just colorful rectangles that don’t speak--instead, an unseen narrator (Danny Wallace) humorously describes each character you meet and comments on what you do as you progress through the landscape. Your ultimate goal is to guide the shapes through their bizarre environment and escape the mainframe. Though escape isn’t exactly what the game means to do--a more accurate term is “emergence”.

The game has 100 levels designed to test your skills in creative problem-solving. Each A.I has its own unique abilities like swimming or jumping, so cooperation is key in achieving the goal. Thomas Was Alone proves you don’t need high-fidelity graphics to make a great and meaningful game. What you need is the power of friendship--and a lot of jumping.