SCHiM Review (PS5) – There was a moment during my playthrough of SCHiM where I truly forgot I was even reviewing a game. Once the movement mechanics of the games clicked into place, I found myself effortlessly navigating isometric areas and hopping from shadow puddle to shadow puddle.
The core of SCHiM is incredibly solid and supported by a visually genius design and music that will throw anybody who plays it into a zen-like trance.
SCHiM is a tremendous puzzle-platformer game that managed to surprise me with just how well all of its moving parts together. Whatever my expectations were, I left with them being blown out of the water – or shadow pool.
SCHiM Review (PS5) – SCHiM-ply Amazing
Playing with Shadows
SCHiM wastes no time with complex introductions or exposition, you are introduced to the main character of the game through an interactive tutorial where you help move a child through various obstacles. You jump from shadow to shadow and help to move obstacles out of the way like an unspoken caretaker.
Over the course of a short prologue, you follow the life of a single human from childhood to teenager, to employed adult. Following a particularly unfortunate day, you are separated from your human and tasked to reunite the pair to make sure they can both survive and that Schim can help their human back on the right path.
This setup isn’t complex and it doesn’t need to be; each screen of the game sees you following your human as he navigates what can only be described as a particularly heavy midlife crisis. From buying a pizza at a convenience store to literally upending his entire life, there’s a definite sense of progression as you move from screen to screen. You get so achingly close to your goal, yet it always seems to fall just slightly out of reach.
Instead of telling a story through dialogue, the entirety of the game is completely wordless. Instead you’ll interpret everything through the animation which is full of character from high-energy sequences to more subdued moments. I enjoyed seeing where the story would go with each new screen and seeing people interact with each other while you hop along was a treat, with more than one moment that had me laugh out loud from the sheer spectacle of the animation work.
This extends to the world itself, which almost resembles a living comic. Instead of the game having a set colour palette, each stage shifts and changes to reflect the area itself. You may go from the dusky orange of a suburban cul-de-sac to a lavender purple high street within the span of minutes.
Its striking visual identity never obscures the areas where you can access and in some cases contributes to a strong sense of mood – particularly in stages that take place at night, supplemented nicely by the pleasant soundtrack that stuck with me after I switched the game off.
Hopping Along
The experience of navigating the world is particularly great too. Each screen of the game is situated in familiar urban environments that we all navigate on a day to day basis. This familiarity is flipped on its head as the Schim needs to survive in the shadows rather than on the sidewalk. As a result, there’s a great deal of environmental manipulation that goes into getting from point A to point B.
Where a lot of challenges can be overcome by simply moving around shadows in an imaginative way, there’s a definite focus on movement and planning moves out to ensure you can hitch a ride to your next destination. Following the crowd of pedestrians down the street may lead you to a new place to explore, and jumping into the shadow of a bird might take you to a completely new area.
SCHiM is a completely linear game, but there are a multitude of optional extras to discover as you move to your next objective. These extra objectives typically take the form of helping another Schim find their way back to their object, and helping them to find their way as you do the same for yourself. These are neat ways to interact with the environment that encourage you to look beyond just where the closest puddle is.
These also open the doors to smaller stories to play out in the environment. Exploring around and seeing what other people are doing in their day-to-day lives and also seeing just how you can interfere with them. With a simple press of a button, you can force the item that you’re linked with to start moving or shifting around. These interactions can range from making a human sneeze to lowering a ticket barrier and causing a horrific traffic buildup.
SCHiM embraces a strong sense of playfulness throughout and it really does help to keep the energy up throughout the adventure.
I would have liked to have seen an option to highlight important interactable objects in the environment with an outline, to ease some brief moments of confusion throughout the narrative. You can easily hold down a button and have the camera pan to your next checkpoint, but the way to get there is sometimes unclear, and that sometimes comes down to objects having functions that aren’t clearly communicated.
Then again – not having these pointed out does lend itself to a sense of experimentation and exploration that would otherwise be taken away. There is something fun about jumping around suddenly finding yourself catapulted into the air by a power line and able to move elsewhere.
Keep on Hopping
SCHiM is a flexible and approachable experience for a myriad of players. As mentioned above, the base game has no strict fail state and no sense of threat throughout. The worst thing that can happen is being sent back to the last stationary area for you to try again.
If you land outside of a shadow puddle, you get the chance to correct your mistake with a short hop. I never found this to be particularly finicky or frustrating, with what feels like a generous margin for error that helped keep the flow up.
Moving obstacles tend to only make up a small part of the areas that you explore and so there aren’t many long areas to retread. For a second playthrough, there are options to increase the difficulty by removing the second jump and giving you a limited number of attempts before starting the level over. For players wanting to test their skills on a returning playthrough, these options are welcome and do work in making the game harder.
While I never went back and played the game with these options enabled, the platforming is tight enough to feel like this is definitely a feasible ask and could be a fun challenge in its own right.
At the end of it, SCHiM is a wonderfully inventive twist on the puzzle-platformer genre that had me smiling from beginning to end and it genuinely made me lose track of the time as I was playing it.
Seeing familiar locations reimagined through the ideas of a delightfully cute character and the satisfying loop of hopping from puddle to puddle was a great time that I can’t praise highly enough. Alongside a story that cuts surprisingly close to home, SCHiM is a well-rounded package that is a must-play for those looking for a new platformer.
In a year already bursting with exciting new indie projects, I wouldn’t let this one slip into the shadows.
SCHiM is available on PS5 and PS4 on July 18, 2024.
Review code generously provided by publisher.