Well it took three years and one incomplete Kickstarter but Extend Studio’s adorable puzzle platformer is finally seeing the light of day on Steam. I had a chance to preview So Many Me back in December and even in its beta stage the game left a positive impression. For the most part the mechanics are exactly as I described them based off that build, so if you’re really dying for a complete overview on how the game plays I would suggest going back and reading the preview.
But as a quick introduction to the unitiated, So Many Me pairs you up with Filo, a happy little green blob who as you (and also he) might suspect, is destined to save the world. Filo does this by amassing an army of clones (referred to in-game as Mes) that assist him in navigating the game’s unique platforming puzzles.
Pressing X on your controller mid-jump will cause one of Filo’s clones to turn into a stone block that hovers in the sky. Filo will attach to the block upon its creation and can then position himself for another jump. The more clones you have, the further you can jump, but you can also get pretty far with just a single clone and some quick fingers.
So Many Me‘s unique platforming means that it might take a little bit to wrap your head around the control scheme. The game does include native support for a 360 pad and it’s all but a necessity to play effectively. The keyboard controls are fairly un-intuitive and to make matters worse there’s no way to re-bind keys in game.
New to the final version of the game is its hub world, Horizon Ruin. Here Filo can choose his next world to tackle, but the area is also home to the artifact smith. Artifacts can be found and purchased and will have a variety of results, sometimes they’ll be simple and innocuous like adding a flip to your jumps, others will be immensely helpful like the artifact that makes bullets pass right through you.
The hub will also connect you to Chrono Castle, a neat little bonus set of challenges that really push the game’s difficulty to the limit. There’s plenty to do here but you will have to be something of a completionist in the main game in order to unlock all the challenges.
So Many Me‘s unique approach to the somewhat crowded indie puzzle platformer genre came very close to earning it a perfect score but unfortunately there are a few little things that drag the overall experience down. When playing the game in its beta form I didn’t encounter any bugs, for whatever reason that was not my experience with the final product. I ran into several moments during play where my character teleported through some walls, one of which trapped me in a locked room and forced me to restart the level.
But by far the biggest low point of So Many Me arrives in the form of its boss battles. To put it bluntly, they’re miserable. Getting killed in one hit isn’t generally super detrimental to the game because its so generous with checkpoints, but for the most part getting hit in a boss battle ensures that you’ll have to do the whole encounter over again. Learning a boss’ pattern is necessary for almost all the game’s encounters but oftentimes you’ll find that their behavior is too erratic to memorize. For example in one encounter you’ll run into an enemy who randomly destroys pieces of the floor beneath you. The problem is that oftentimes he’ll destroy the only safe place that you could have been standing while he sweeps across the level.
Make sure you have a suicide hotline number handy for your second encounter with this guy.
So Many Me is beautiful to look at and overall feels like a breath of fresh air in the indie platformer scene. Beware the difficulty curve though, the game may look like its perfect for your kids but its cutesy graphics hide a sometimes brutal inner core. I’d still definitely recommend checking it out, especially if you’re up for a somewhat unexpected challenge. The game retails on Steam for $14.99 but will be 20% off until the 24th.
