Reviews: Thomas Was Alone and Fez (PC)

I'm doubling up on reviews here because I've been ripping through way too many games lately, and while I'd like to get my general thoughts on each down before I forget those thoughts completely, I want to do things with my life other than blog. Like kill us all.

Just...kidding?

Thomas Was Alone
So, Thomas Was Alone was a fucking revelation. It's the rare indie experiment in minimalism that not only works, it works so well it makes you question whether the minimalist-style games you've played before actually worked as well as you thought they did when you first thought they did work.

The game is your basic jumping-and-steering platformer, with the slight twist that you solve puzzles by switching "party" members throughout. Each party member has a different ability (or abilities), and so you end up having to have them work together (i.e., Thomas isn't alone for long) to reach each level's exit. The result is a game that's part platforming and part puzzle-solving. None of the platforming nor the puzzle-solving ever reaches a legitimately challenging level, so though everything feels really satisfying (the jumping is especially well-weighted, especially when using a USB controller), by itself the gameplay would make a clever-but-not-especially-exciting platfuzzler (portmanteau police!).

Fortunately, the gameplay isn't alone, either.

The gameplay is supplemented by some of the cleverest, best-written, and best-performed voice acting that I've ever seen/heard in a game. It's simply a narrator telling the story of the your various avatars' feelings and impressions of the world they're making their way through, but somehow...someway...it manages to turn two-dimensional shapes into some of the most three-dimensional characters I've ever met in a video game.

For example, this is awesome, but you'll only understand why if you play the game.

And this makes all the difference. It's not that the game is unfun by itself; instead, this is a perfect example of what I call "worldbuilding" in my scholarly-type writing: the voiceovers flesh out the action. You guide the various shapes through the platfuzzling action, and The Voice adds an emotional context to your actions. It's a synergy between exposition and gameplay that actually works because the shapes' various personality traits (as presented by the voiceover) match their actual, physical abilities (controlled and utilized by you). The result, paired with the game's extra-abstract, weirdo soundtrack, make basically a perfect combination.

This was really driven home to me after SPOILERS the end of the penultimate chapter, wherein you lose control of the characters you've utilized (and grown to care for, frankly) for the entirety of the game up to this point, and they are replaced with new shapes, new characters, new personalities. I was surprisingly affected by this switch; I wanted to see what happened to my new friends, and the idea that theses damn interlopers would be taking their place for the denouement of the story was vexing. After about three levels, though, I was totally engrossed in these new shapes' stories. It only took me about fifteen minutes of play to get totally reinvested. It was like the devs took me out of the originally story and stoked my frustration on purpose just so they could prove how goddamn amazingly immersive the experience of playing their game was.

And they wouldn't be wrong. END SPOILERS It's awesome. Check it out.

Fez
I'm just going to spoil this one right up front: this was another one of those games that I'd heard amazing things about, paid a decent amount of money for, and then just didn't like.

Smile all you want; you cannot mute my hatred.

It started out innocuously enough: there was a little fez-guy, and he jumped around, and he could rotate the world. Cool gimmick. Really well-produced gimmick. Nice music, nice art style. But really, when it came down to it, there was no gameplay substance. I played Fez for the lion's share of two nights, and when I was done, the game told me I was something like 85% finished (or so). All I had done was run and jump and rotate, run and jump and rotate, over and over and over, through occasionally changing (and admittedly brilliant-looking) environs. That was about it. The rotating thing is cool, but it sort of felt like if someone had made the original Super Mario Bros. without pipes and then Super Mario Bros. 2 was the exact same game, but with pipes you could go down. It would have been cool, but after you'd gone down a few pipes, you'd be over it. That's how Fez feels to me: there's an interesting new gameplay twist (I sort of shuddered just typing that, sorry) here, and it plays really well in a stylistic sense; however, it doesn't serve as the basis of a bunch of interesting skills the player is made to learn throughout the game. Instead, you just do the same thing over and over and over: rotate, look for cubes, repeat ad nauseum.

Until you get to 85% (or so) completion. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes necessary to decipher a number of bizarro ideographic puzzles "hidden" within the game's levels. Why you suddenly have to engage in medium-level cryptography at this point, when it hasn't been a part of the game at all before now is beyond me. You just do. Then the game descends into another, less satisfying pattern: using the built-in, terribly confusing map screen to navigate back to levels that you've already played so you can scribble symbols down on pieces of notebook paper, and then semi-arbitrarily try to enact the instructions described by these hidden languages in particular locations throughout the gameworld. It's about as horrible as it sounds, considering that a few minutes before this was just a pleasant but bland platforming game.

Anyway, I actually screwed around with this part of the game for a few hours, but eventually wasn't making progress that didn't entail third, fourth, fifth, or even tenth trips back to level that I'd previously scoured, and I just gave up. Honestly, aside from the somewhat interesting art direction in this game, I didn't see what all the hubbub was about. It was basically just boring as balls and made by a dev who obviously believed more in his own vision for a weird, unengaging but demanding puzzle-world than he did in making a game that was actually fun to play. Which is sort of sad, because I paid $10 to be alternately bored an angry for 8 or so hours, and because generally speaking, fezzes are cool.