Company of Myself - a review

With complete disregard for the aforementioned Plan, I will now review a little Flash game I was directed to via twitter.

Company of Myself is a really simple little puzzle platformer created by Eli Piilonen with artwork from Lika Marcetic and music by David Carney. A melancholy hermit muses on his loneliness and self-imposed exile while his psychological journey is reflected in his journeys between entering a series of rooms and getting through them to their green door exits.

The mechanics are nice, simple obstacles can be overcome by running your character through certain movements with the arrow keys then resetting the level with space bar and watching a shadow form of yourself run your previous movements alongside you.

I didn’t discover any glaring bugs, though the game won’t thank you for creating too many shadow selves in a level (where you get the opportunity).

The atmosphere of the game is thoughtful; minimalist but well crafted and the running commentary through each level has a nice, understated sense of humour to it. For the most part it coheres very nicely. However; as much as, for the most part, I loved the atmosphere and the writing, the final ‘twist’ in the afterword did somewhat leave a bad taste in my mouth; at best it needs a rewrite, but to my mind it’s unnecessary all together.

Only twenty short levels Company of Myself took me a very short time to complete (hence no 1 hour review) but on the positive side has no time to get repetitive and most levels have a different way of using the mechanic to get through the level – some require a lot of forward planning, some require a strict sense of timing and still others just require you to throw yourself at it. However, it would have been nice to see extended levels revisiting the different kinds of puzzle that this kind of mechanic is capable of producing and improving their complexity.

All together, even though the game works well, it is perhaps too minimal and self-contained; I can’t help but feel that with more or longer puzzles I would have left me feeling more satisfied – or maybe taking out some of the elements which are only used in one or two levels and making a separate game with them. There is a level with a ‘checkpoint flower’ that resets the level from a different point – but it is one flower in one level – it is far too short a game to be learning new tools so far in – it also makes for a somewhat uneven difficulty curve.

Still, I would recommend this game: its shortcomings only really grate because I see so much potential in it; and there are far worse ways to spend some idle time in front of your PC.