Coma

Thomas Brush was eighteen and still in school when he started building Coma, working on it between classes in a computer lab and finishing it in his bedroom, illustrating, coding, scoring and voicing it single-handedly in ActionScript 2.0. According to his own retrospective account, repeated in coverage around Neversong's 2020 release, he expected the finished game to draw "a few players and a decent score" when he uploaded it to Newgrounds. It reportedly drew more than eight million plays instead, plus enough attention that a sequel he began sketching out, Once Upon a Coma, eventually became a fully funded console and PC game. That trajectory — one teenager's free browser game becoming the seed of a decade-long studio's flagship release — is the reason Coma is worth revisiting today, more than the fifteen minutes of play it actually offers.

What it is

Coma puts you in control of Pete, a small boy searching a strange, twilit world for his sister, who has been shut away in their father's basement. A bird companion tags along and can retrieve items out of Pete's reach; beyond that, the toolset is walking with the arrow keys and clicking to advance dialogue. Jay Is Games' contemporary review, published a month after release, timed the whole experience at around fifteen minutes and noted it contains no scoring system and nothing that can kill the player — this is closer to an illustrated short story you walk through than a platformer with stakes. A recurring in-world message, "THIS WORLD IS A LIE," and a plot that resolves around waking rather than escaping, make the coma of the title literal rather than just atmospheric shorthand.

The puzzles that do exist lean on dream logic rather than mechanical challenge — PopMatters' 2010 review points to an early piano that seems purposeless until much later, as the clearest example of a design built to be understood rather than solved by trial and error. That's a reasonable way to build a fifteen-minute mood piece, and a genuinely difficult thing to fake: you either buy into the world's internal logic or you don't, and Coma commits to it completely rather than hedging with a conventional puzzle structure underneath.

The art carries it, and mostly earns the carrying

Every source that covered Coma at release led with the same observation: it looked like almost nothing else on Newgrounds in 2010. PopMatters described the visual style as closer to "a recent issue of a pop art magazine" than a typical Flash platformer, and both contemporary reviews spend more time on tone and atmosphere than on anything resembling mechanics — which is a fair reflection of where the game actually spends its effort. The soundtrack drew its own praise independent of the visuals, distinctive enough that Brush's later collaborator on Neversong built directly on it rather than starting over.

Where the seams show is in execution rather than intent. Jay Is Games called Pete's movement "precise and tight" on release, but also noted that some players found it "slippery," and PopMatters was more direct: Pete would periodically get stuck running or jumping, a bug the reviewer suspected but doubted was deliberate, because "it breaks the mood" rather than adding to it. That's a real defect in a game whose entire pitch is unbroken atmosphere, and there's no record of it ever being patched — Coma was a one-and-done Flash upload, not a game with a post-launch support cycle.

A thin toolset, judged on its own terms

Judged as a piece of 2010 browser design rather than against anything with a budget behind it, Coma's thinness is a choice as much as a limitation. A solo teenage developer built an entire illustrated, voiced, scored world in ActionScript 2.0 around a single walk-click-fetch loop, and made the atmosphere itself the mechanic — that's a reasonable trade to make inside the constraints of a hobby project with no team and no deadline beyond finishing school. It is also, by Brush's own later description of the game, a project with "pretty much no real memorable gameplay mechanics," which is as honest a self-assessment as a review needs. The frustration contemporary reviewers voiced wasn't that the game was bad at what it attempted, but that there wasn't more of it — Jay Is Games closed by hoping for longer work from the same developer, which reads less like a complaint about Coma and more like an early, accurate prediction of Pinstripe and Neversong.

Playable today, and where the story actually finished

The original Flash file was built in ActionScript 2.0, the version Ruffle — the emulator now standing in for the dead Flash Player across Newgrounds and other surviving portals — supports far more reliably than the ActionScript 3.0 titles of the platform's later years. General Newgrounds and Flashpoint Archive documentation confirms AS2 content is exactly the category their respective emulation efforts handle best, which is a reasonable basis for expecting Coma to still run cleanly; this review was not able to load Coma's own Newgrounds page directly to confirm its current vote count or exact framerate, so treat that as informed inference rather than a checked fact, current as of 5 September 2026.

What's unambiguous is that the game's actual continuation exists elsewhere. Brush spent years rebuilding the same premise — a boy, a missing sibling, a father, dream logic — into Neversong, a four-hour game with new art, hack-and-slash combat and parkour movement, which launched on Apple Arcade in May 2020 and later on PS4, Switch and Steam. Separately, a direct remaster of the original called Coma HD went up on Steam the same May, letting the 2010 Flash game run full-screen on modern PC without a browser, for US$4.99, listed as companion content alongside Neversong. For anyone who wants the exact 2010 experience rather than the version Brush spent a decade revising, that remaster — not Neversong itself — is the more honest point of comparison.

Final verdict

Coma is a fifteen-minute student project that happened to land at the exact moment a huge, starved-for-something-different Newgrounds audience was ready for it, and on its own terms that's still worth the sitting: the art direction, the score and the coma-as-narrative-device idea are all doing real work, and none of it needed a bigger budget to land. It is not, on replay, a mechanically rich game, and the control jank contemporary reviewers flagged in 2010 was never addressed. A 7.0 reflects both halves honestly — a genuinely distinctive mood piece that is more interesting for what it led to than for what fifteen minutes of walking and clicking can sustain on its own.

Players curious where this idea went next should look at Neversong, Brush's full console reimagining of the same premise, or at other short, atmosphere-first browser narratives from the same period like The Company of Myself and Loved.