The Company of Myself

Eli Piilonen put "The Company of Myself" on Newgrounds on 22 November 2009 under his usual handle, 2DArray, and within a day it had a full review from Jay Is Games calling it "a thoroughly psychological romp, equal parts replay-themed platformer and character study." That framing has stuck for a reason: this is a puzzle platformer whose puzzle mechanic is also, quite deliberately, its entire thesis statement, and it is short and specific enough that the mechanic and the message never have room to drift apart from each other the way they do in most games that try the same trick.

A level solved by your own history

The rule is introduced in the first room and never changes: you walk to the goal, and at any point you can press a key to rewind, leaving behind a silent, translucent copy of yourself that repeats your exact movements on a loop. Stand that copy on a switch, have it hold a door, have it block a hazard, and the version of you now in control can walk past and finish what the recording started. Later rooms stack two, three, four of these recordings against each other, each one a rerun of a route you already solved, until clearing a level means choreographing a small crowd of your own past selves rather than controlling one character.

None of this was a new idea in November 2009 — record-and-replay puzzle platforming had already had a moment earlier that decade, and anyone who'd played through that wave would recognise the shape of it here immediately. What The Company of Myself does that most of that wave didn't bother with is give the trick a reason to exist beyond the puzzle box: the game is explicitly about a hermit who has withdrawn from the people around him, and asking you to solve every room by leaning on echoes of yourself, rather than on anyone else, is the metaphor doing its job in the background while you're just trying to reach a door. It's a small idea, but it's aimed precisely, and Piilonen himself has described the intent behind games like this one as being "half puzzle game and half character study" — which is a fair description of exactly what got built.

The walls doing the narration

There is no dialogue box and no cutscene. Instead, lines of the hermit's own thoughts fade in and out of the level geometry as you move through it — ambient, half-formed, the kind of interior monologue that reads like someone talking himself out of leaving the house. It's a cheap technique in the literal sense (a Flash game from 2009 could afford dynamic text far more easily than character animation or voice acting) and an effective one in practice, because it lets the story advance at exactly the pace you're already moving at, without ever stopping the puzzle to deliver a point.

The subject underneath that text — social withdrawal, self-doubt, the difficulty of actually asking someone else for help — is why the game has had an unusually long afterlife for a free portal platformer. A 2013 Vice retrospective on Piilonen's work described the game as building toward the idea that isolation is understandable but sometimes has to be confronted anyway, and traced a direct line from it to Piilonen's own follow-up, Fixation, a prequel released not long after that expanded the same cast with denser dialogue and harder puzzles. The game was still being cited years later, turning up in Michael Rose's 2014 book "250 Indie Games You Must Play" and in academic writing about how games handle mental health — a longer tail of attention than almost any other free 2009 Flash platformer got. None of that guarantees the ending lands for every player, and it's worth saying plainly that it doesn't: the same Jay Is Games review that praised the game's design said flatly that it "wasn't a tremendous fan of the ending," and that split — admiration for the build, ambivalence about the payoff — shows up again in later discussion of the game as well. Leetdom won't spoil the specific turn here, in keeping with how contemporary reviewers handled it, but it's fair warning that the closing minutes are the part people disagree about, not the part everyone came away loving.

Plain rooms, a quiet score

Visually, this is about as unadorned as a 2009 Flash platformer gets: repeating platform tiles, one background, and a player sprite that exists mostly to be duplicated rather than admired. That's a defensible choice for a game whose actual content is text and timing rather than spectacle, but it does mean there's very little here to look at on its own merits, and none of the puzzle rooms are memorable as pieces of level design once you've solved them. The score, composed by David Carney, is doing more of the game's atmospheric work than the art is — it's minimal and melancholy in a way that matches the writing, and it's specific enough that Kongregate's own tag list for the game includes "Good Music" alongside the genre tags, and Jay Is Games' 2009 review called it out by name.

Mechanically, the puzzles themselves are not the draw, and no amount of goodwill toward the writing should paper over that. Jay Is Games' review — written the day after release, when the game was as fresh as it would ever be — noted that experienced platformer players wouldn't find much resistance in any individual room, and that assessment has nothing to do with the format aging; the puzzles were built to be solvable quickly so the narrative could keep moving, which is a reasonable trade-off for a twenty-minute game but is a real one, and it's the main reason this doesn't score higher on gameplay alone.

What's left of it, seventeen years on

Checked 5 September 2026: The Company of Myself is still up on both Newgrounds and Kongregate, and both sites now serve it through Ruffle rather than a native Flash plugin — Newgrounds was one of the first portals to fund Ruffle's development specifically to keep its own back catalogue playable after Flash's death, and Kongregate added Ruffle support to its library in 2022. There is no evidence this particular file needs anything more exotic than that; it's a simple platformer with no server-side high-score component to lose, unlike games that depended on a leaderboard that has since gone dark. The figures that established its original reputation — reported elsewhere as an average Newgrounds score around 9.7 out of 10 and just under half a million views by September 2010, alongside a Daily Feature and a Weekly 2nd Place award — could not be independently confirmed against Newgrounds' own page for this review, since Newgrounds returned an access error to automated requests at the time of checking; they're recorded here as reported, not verified firsthand. Kongregate's own current rating, checked directly, sits at 4.3 out of 5.

Piilonen's career since is itself a small piece of evidence for how the game was received at the time: he went on to co-make Spewer with Edmund McMillen in 2010, later released the prequel Fixation and the roguelike Not the Robots under the 2DArray name, and today works as a lead designer at the indie studio Messhof. A twenty-minute free Newgrounds game turning into a genuine calling-card credit is not a common outcome for the format, and it's a reasonable measure of how seriously this particular one was taken at the time.

Final verdict

The Company of Myself is a short, mechanically simple, undemanding puzzle platformer that happens to have said something real with its one idea, and said it efficiently enough that people were still writing about it five years later. It doesn't hold up as a puzzle-design showcase — it was never trying to — and its ending won't sit right with everyone who plays it. What it does have is a clean thematic match between its mechanic and its subject, a score and a text-driven narration that both punch above the game's visual budget, and a genuinely unusual afterlife for a free 2009 portal game. 7.5 is a fair mark for something that is more interesting than it is difficult, and more worth remembering than it is worth replaying.