Public introspection is rarely pleasant. The Company Of Myself is a game that opens with the phrase: “If you have a minute, I’d like to tell you a bit about myself. The first thing you need to understand is that I am alone”. Yet impressively, creator Eli Piilonen has managed to wrestle what could have been an unhealthy dose of teen angst into something rather beautiful.

It’s about imaginary friends, in a way. You control a little figure in a rather fetching hat who wants to get to a series of green squares because he wants to be their friend. The problem is that in between you and those green squares are vertiginous drops, towering cliffs and humming forcefields. You can’t do this alone.

So you have to employ echos of your past existence to help you. They retain some corporeality, meaning that you can jump on their heads, and they can jump on yours. Together, any objective is surmountable. The implication being, of course, that you don’t need anyone else to help you in life – enough attempts at something will give you the experience to accomplish anything. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.

You’ll run up against forcefields that you can penetrate but that your ghostly doubles can’t, and ones that can be passed by the doubles but not you. As a result, you often find yourself controlling the future, without being able to directly see your actions on-screen. A keen sense of timing is vital, particularly when you come to some of the Braid-inspired switch-puzzles, and you’ll need a reasonable grasp of basic platforming skills too.

The art, work of Luka Marcetic, is simplistic, and functional. It’s a curious match-up of soft focus and pixel art, and occasionally will go grainy to denote a flashback to both painful and happy memories. The music, from David Carney, is similarly functional. It burbles away in the background, happily ignorable, a little too busy to let you relax, but too simplistic and repetitive to be memorable.

All the while, a story plays out in text (italic Arial – there’s got to be better typographical choices than that) overhead, with the main character half-explaining what you have to do on each screen and half-telling the game’s narrative. The mash-up is generally pretty effective, except in the very first few levels where it goes through the controls. Do games really have to explain the arrow keys every single time you play?

The Company Of Myself could have been a terrible visit to the mind of a 16-year-old who never gets picked for the football team. It’s not. It’s a touching journey in the memories of someone who prefers not to seek the company of others. You should go and play it.