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The Company of Myself | Free Online Game
Behold the puzzle platformer with soul, The Company of Myself, a game from 2D Array. If you like puzzle games, and often bemoan the lack of genuine story telling in many modern games, you'll fall head over heels in love with The Company of Myself.
It's not often I call a game beautiful. Some games attempt some kind of philosophy, but the way they do it is often clunky and cheesy. The Company of Myself is a truly beautiful game – and that is saying a lot.
Without giving away any spoilers, this is a game about solitude and about self reliance, about standing on the shoulders of your past mistakes and using the past to elevate yourself to new heights. Whilst this sounds like the talk of a motivational speaker, when it comes to The Company of Myself, this is actually pretty much a walk through.
At first glance, The Company of Myself is just another platformer game. Sure, it has pretty graphics and a somewhat haunting melody, but it doesn't seem to differentiate itself all that much from games like Mario Brothers, etc. Then you begin to actually play the game and everything. changes.
You see, as with many platform games, you come across apparently insurmountable obstacles. In other games you'd perhaps push blocks to create a ledge to jump from. In The Company of Myself, pressing the spacebar creates a shadow you, a shadow sprite that repeats the actions you made up until the point you pressed the spacebar. You can use these sprites as ledges from which to jump. In using the sprites, you not only see all the actions of your past selves, you also see your past mistakes. Take that, philosophers!
Of course, these shadow selves are not only good for acting as platforms, they can also perform tasks for you, allowing you sometimes to be in two places at once in a manner of speaking, or perhaps, to exist simultaneously in two time streams. At other times, they act as mirror selves, displaying a versatility that, quite frankly, enchants my brain.
The entire game is an allegory, narrated by one lonely soul, who manages to turn the usual frustrations of a platform game into a sort of mildly amusing emo dialog that I personally enjoyed quite a great deal.
'I see a wall blocking the path to the exit, I am dissatisfied'.
'I am grateful of my above average ability to work alone.'
A word of warning however, such a melancholy game will not necessarily bring with it a happy ending. This game is much more Asian cinema than Hollywood happy ending, if you know what I mean. If you don't, go watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.