Recently, my wife decided that she wanted to try Thomas Was Alone, a really charming indie game that’s one of my favorites. So I downloaded the tar file from Humble Bundle, where I’d bought the game a couple years ago and tried to run the binary. It didn’t work. Here’s what I had to do to get the game running.

1) At first, the game wouldn’t even start cause it couldn’t find some .so files. This was solved by installing some i386 libs:

sudo apt-get install libglu1-mesa:i386
sudo apt-get install libxcursor1:i386

2) Once the game started, there wasn’t any sound. Thomas Was Alone is, in my opinion, primarily a good game because of its soundscape and narration, so this was an essential fix:

sudo apt-get install libpulse0:i386

3) When we actually stared playing, the narration was silent. After digging around for a moment, I found that the game settings had defaulted the vocal noise level to -41%, and all it took was changing the setting to a positive number.

That’s it! Now you can enjoy a couple of hours of helping Thomas and his friends move “predominantly up and to the right.”

PS: As a bonus, here’s the script I used to make an Ubuntu desktop file for the game:

sudo mkdir /opt/thomas-was-alone
sudo chown -R YOUR_USER:YOUR_USER /opt/thomas-was-alone
mv thomaswasalone-linux-1369349552.tar /opt/thomas-was-alone/
cd /opt/thomas-was-alone
tar xf thomaswasalone-linux-1369349552.tar
cd thomasLinuxStandalone
mv * ../
cd ..
rm -fr thomasLinuxStandalone
chmod +x thomasWasAlone

wget https://msiebert.github.io/assets/img/thomas-was-alone-ubuntu-1604/thomas.png -O thomas.png

cat > ~/.local/share/applications/thomaswasalone.desktop <<EOL
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Thomas Was Alone
Comment=Play Thomas Was Alone
Exec=/opt/thomas-was-alone/thomasWasAlone
Icon=/opt/thomas-was-alone/thomas.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Games;
EOL

After that, you’ll just need to log out and log back in and you’ll be able to launch Thomas Was Alone from your launcher!