Mike Bithell’s classic indie puzzle platformer Thomas Was Alone has been released on the iPad today. The game, ported by Surgeon Simulator developer Bossa Studios, features 100 levels, a new on-screen control system designed for iOS, and the same narration by Danny Wallace for which the British filmmaker and actor won a BAFTA Games Award in 2013.

Thomas Was Alone is one of the best games I’ve played this year. I bought the PS Vita version a few months ago, and I’ve been constantly impressed by Bithell’s tasteful level design and focus on collaboration between characters to get through stages. In Thomas Was Alone, you control a group of AIs who have become sentient and want to escape the computer mainframe they’re trapped into; the AIs (Thomas and his friends) are rectangles, and each one of them has a special ability, whether it’s higher jump or the ability to float on water. To complete stages, you’ll have to think in terms of collaboration rather than individualities: there are platforms that can be reached only if one character helps another jump onto it, while water-based sections require the AIs to proceed on top of the one that can swim. The way AIs, game mechanics, and narrations are intertwined makes for a classy, precise, and elegant game that always requires you to think of platforms as puzzles that can be solved by collaborating instead of running towards the end of a level. I love Thomas Was Alone and I can’t wait for Bithell’s next game.

Polygon has an interview with Bithell in which he explains the new controls for iPad:

“On either side of the screen, we have these color balls that you put your thumb on in order to select which character you want to use,” he said. “It’s a really intuitive, easy thing that you can basically play the entire game without moving your hands.

“That was the thing. It’s on iPad. If you’re holding the iPad, I don’t want you to ever have to move your hands from flanking either side of the iPad in your hands. I don’t want you to have to put the weight of the iPad in one hand and then use your finger for something else. It’s all played in that kind of default gamer position of the two thumbs, ready to do stuff on the screen.”

Thomas Was Alone for iPad is available at $8.99 on the App Store.

A great passage from Christian Donlan’s piece for Eurogamer about the E.T. landfill in New Mexico and lack of restraint on modern app stores:

But with that access - and without curation by companies that actually appreciated games - came a race to the bottom, where much of the good stuff was then buried by an endless deluge of miserable clones and cash-grabs that were allowed in because the gatekeepers didn’t care. Free-to-play is not the problem - it’s that publishers and platform holders and sometimes even developers let the deeper value of a game erode, that there was often a failure to find the correct free-to-play model that enhanced a game - and that some people apparently think it’s fine to refer to their most valued customers as whales.

The difference is that, thirty years from now, there won’t be a New Mexico landfill to recover old apps from.

I am arguing that this is what we have forgotten in our chase for mobile profit, that we can’t see the creative woods for the data trees. For all our mountains of information we’ve collected about user habits and sales, the gut-level ability to give joy and inspire our audience remains the job of our industry’s creative people first and every other industry role second. Our ability to communicate to, reach and inspire the people that we make things for is the foundation for everything any artist or craftsperson ever produced.

The fundamental communication power of mobile as a platform to push gaming remains entirely intact. But the logic of chasing mountainous profit is self-defeating.

Inspiring, thought-provoking piece by Fireproof Games’ Barry Meade over at Polygon. Data and analytics should aid creativity, not dictate and restrain its genius.

If you read one thing about mobile gaming today, make it this one.