Developed by Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman and published by Extra Nice and Playism, SCHiM is a brand-new and unique 3d puzzle platformer where you live in the shadows. The 3D puzzle platformer is a pretty saturated genre and to stand out from the crowd, you really need to have a unique formula. SCHiM managed to pull this off pretty easily with its beautiful art style and smooth gameplay mechanics. This is our review of SCHiM on the PS5 in which we annoy traffic cars and swim across a pond in a duck’s shadow.
In SCHiM, you play as a little frog-like creature called SCHiM who lives in the shadows. You are tied to a human being and everywhere your human goes, you go with them in their shadow. The game starts with the human as a kid, and we get to live through their life. It starts pretty sweet from school-going age, and we see them grow up, go to college, get a job, find a girlfriend and everything seems to be going great for some time. However, things take a turn for the worse when we get our heart broken, we lose our job and ultimately our house, and one accident causes us to become separated from our human. Throughout the early minutes, we grow a liking for our human, and this causes us to chase them down to reunite with them and this officially starts the story.
The gameplay of SCHiM is fairly straightforward. You have to jump from one shadow to another and reach the endpoint at each level. The levels are sort of open-world levels with plenty of interactable items and objects in the mix. Since your character is like a frog, it treats the shadows like water as you can glide and swim through them. Even jumping from one shadow to another gives that thwap sound like you are jumping from water to water. This jumping is fluid and satisfying and how it reacts to your input controls is just addictive. You can easily adjust your jumps by short-pressing or long-pressing the X button and this is smooth. During my many failures, it was not because of clunky controls but because I couldn’t time my jump properly or couldn’t see where to jump next in time. To clear a level, you must find the finishing point which can be checked out by pressing and holding the R2 button.
The game does not really tell you what needs to be done and this sometimes causes you to get stuck on open levels like the one on the highway. I managed to reach a certain point only to get stuck for a long time before I figured out that I had to turn a red light green before coming here so that I could use the moving traffic to cross an intersection. I had to restart this level, but this is again one of the charms of its gameplay. You never know what you need to do and just accidentally stumble upon things that need to be done to move ahead. Only a few places force you to do certain things like push a button to raise a forklift to cast its shadow and move along or press a button to open a shutter and get inside a locked door. These interactions are cool and give you some sort of a relationship with the environment around you. Nearly all of the objects or items that cast a shadow and you can jump to them, have some sort of a fun animation when you jump to them and interact with them.
You can sound car horns, throw out thrash, print stuff, operate heavy machinery, open locked doors, and whatnot just from the shadows. You can also make humans sneeze if you interact with them while in their shadow. These little details keep you busy in levels that otherwise would be pretty boring to just dash through. There were times when I was just randomly moving around in a duck’s shadow making it quack and then I was honking a car’s horn at other traffic cars making them horn in return. These little activities and animations keep you glued to the game and make you explore even more of the environments around you. Each level gives you plenty of opportunities to explore them thoroughly for hidden items to find and just interact with random items. You can follow a single line to complete a level, but you can jump around and explore at your own will as well.
The level design is where SCHiM really shines. Not only are these levels brimming with activity, but they are also great to explore as well. As you move through different levels of different themes, you interact with tons of items and objects. You explore highways, parks, beaches, shipping companies, bus stands, and plenty of areas that you would normally find while exploring a city. Each location has plenty of activity and people moving here and there. You are free to explore everything and interact with different items to see how they react. Some objects and items have their SCHiMs as well, but they do not do anything unless they are collectibles and if you find them, their shadows jump back into them after you place them in the right location.
I was happy to see that SCHiM even comes with a sort of endgame content where you can try and complete the game with some challenging controls. One of these includes turning off the second jump and completing the entire game with only a single jump. These act as harder modes to try and complete the game. Obviously, these are optional, and you can only try them if you love trophy hunting or are a completionist otherwise, SCHiM is a fairly laid-back game and does not do anything to raise your blood pressure. Certain locations demand timed jumps to sync with moving objects to progress ahead in the game but mostly, you can take your sweet time to complete levels at your own pace.
SCHiM features a bold color palette but it is mostly because the game wants to focus on the shadows so that you can easily spot them and move through them. Depending on the items and objects, the shadows vary in shape and size, so it becomes tedious if everything just mingles with each other. For this very reason, SCHiM’s levels feature colors that are very bold to highlight the dark shadows. Some levels are played during the night as well and you cannot just move through the dark. You can only move through shadows cast by objects when there is light so even in these levels, the colors are chosen so that you can easily differentiate the shadows from normal dark.
Probably one of the best accessibility features that I have ever seen in any video game is present in SCHiM. It allows you to change the entire color palette at any level. If you think a level is too red and white, you can change it completely to black and yellow. There are no restrictions on this, and you can go absolutely nuts about the visuals. Each level in SCHiM has its own unique, default colors which are mostly according to your human’s mood but if you are not feeling comfortable with them, head over to the settings and you can switch them up live with four different slots offering you a different color for nearly everything on the screen. I played with the default color scheme because they did not bother me much but if you have to change them because of some reason, the option is right there. You can also thicken the outlines if the default ones are too thin for you. Exceptional work done by the developers.
While I loved SCHiM in every possible way, there are indeed some aspects that did bother me during my playthrough. One of the major ones is the camera controls. While pressing L1 and R1 was fine to rotate the camera around, I figured that it would have been better to just assign a free rotatable camera to the right joystick. There were a lot of instances when I jumped from one shadow to another, and my view was completely blocked. In some instances, I was longing for a rotatable camera because I wanted a better look at the environment around me. Pressing L1 and R1 would move the camera to a locked position and that was fine mostly but in some instances, I wanted a free movable camera for a more accurate approach.
SCHiM is a lively game. Everywhere you go, the world feels alive. There is some sort of activity going on. Whether it is a road, a street, a market, or even a side alley, there is always some sort of movement happening and this is what makes this game feel so alive. Couple this with the fact that the level design is exceptional, you have a virtual world that feels equivalent to the real world, just with a monotone theme. The controls are crisp, the audio design is great, and the simple UI keeps things fresh all the way to the credits screen. This is one of the biggest surprises for me this year but then again, 2024 is the year of the Indies and this is another AAA indie that everyone will remember for a long time. There are a few hiccups in it when it comes to camera control, but the good things easily overshadow them for me.
Final Verdict:
SCHiM is one of the best puzzle platforming games that I have played this year so far and believe me, I have played a lot of them. What I like about SCHiM the most is while it masquerades as a puzzle platformer, it is not always about puzzles. Sure, you have to figure out a way to reach the end goal, but the path is not always a tricky one even in late sections of the game. While you may be tempted to just make a dash for the exit, the little details here and there make you want to explore the entire level before you complete it. I love the level designs and I also adore the art style of the game. The color palette might not be for everyone, but you can even customize it if you want to. If you are looking for a beautiful and simplistic platforming game with tons of character, you must go for SCHiM and even if you are not a big fan of platforming games, can still easily recommend it to you. Give it a shot.
Final Score: 9.5/10
