As a kid, I first wondered about the curious potential of the dark splotchy mimic underneath my feet thanks to Peter Pan. Watching him play a rough and tumble game of tag with his own shadow, imagining an entire existence and reality separate from my own in this darkness under my own feet? Magic.
Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman certainly came to a similar conclusion as they got to work crafting SCHiM, a game all about the magic of shadows and the importance of keeping yours tightly wrapped to you.
Just the Facts |
Developer: Ewoud van der Werf, Nils Slijkerman |
Publisher: Extra Nice, Playism |
Platform(s): PC*, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series S and X, Nintendo Switch *denotes platform reviewed on |
Price: $24.99 |
Release Date: July 18, 2024 |
Review key provided by developer via Pirate PR. |
Shadows aren't just edgy anymore!
It's about time we made shadows friendly again in gaming and not just the homes for silent assassins.
SCHiM comes to us backed by Extra Nice, a studio that helps creatives bring their ideas to life with a team of dedicated artists and programmers ready to help turn visions into prototypes for analog and digital games. Ewoud interned there, Nils is a co-founder, and the two have come together to bring us this shadow-based puzzle platformer that sees you hopping from one shadow to the next through 65 unique levels.
Silent film-like in its execution, SCHiM tells a dialogue-less story about the bond between a frog-like shadow being, the schim itself, and its human. Every single thing in this world has a schim — described as the soul and spirit of an object or living being — and their connection is key to living life to the fullest.
The story starts with this cute sequence that shows the schim and the child's growth. You see him go from a goofy child running and playing with friends to a teenager awkwardly flirting to an adult struggling through a soulless corporate work life. After one of the human's worst days, the human and schim get separated, and the story becomes a journey to reunite. You control the schim, following after its human through some life-changing activities around the city, but constantly finding itself two steps behind. The story is ultimately about recapturing joy in your life, which finds some synergy with its gameplay. Without his schim, you watch your human struggle to find his footing again and attempt to rediscover passion. Each level shows you a moment in the life of these folks in the Dutch-inspired town you call home. Kids playing in the park, couples on dates at the ice cream shop, people doing their grocery shopping. It has you helping other schims who've lost their connection while desperately hopping your way home.
If you were a kid who jumped over cracks, who found games in the mundane world around you, who made shadow puppets with regularity, SCHiM is all about capturing that joy and imagination again. It's a simple story that does most of its communicating in the gameplay, that asks you to fill in the gaps with your own imagination — and the way that aligns with its message is special. It honestly didn't need a narrative at all, but the feelings it provoked in its closing moments were surprising, and though the story concept is certainly familiar, it was enjoyable nonetheless.
SCHiM's simple satisfaction
The game's simplicity, that ask for the players to tap into their childhood imagination and just play, is core to SCHiM's gameplay as well.
As a little schim, you're only capable of traversing through the shadows. You hop from each pool of darkness to the next, trying to find a path toward a simple goal waiting at the end of the stage that'll take you one step closer to retethering with your human. If you ever hop into the light, you'll be given one extra opportunity to jump, but ultimately find yourself severely limited in traversal, before finally getting zapped back to one of your checkpoint shadows somewhere down the line.
Each level is its own mini-sandbox, with a surprising number of ways to reach the end. I was amazed by how cleverly the developers stretched the shadow concept to its absolute ends in level design. There are lightning-based, timed shadow jumps, where you wait for a blazing bolt to cast its light, creating new shadows in otherwise pure darkness. You use the hazard lights on construction barriers to cast shadows on a scene to edge forward. You use your schim's ability to manipulate objects to trigger stoplights, giving your passing car shadows so you can hitch a ride on it — or to fling yourself forward with the strength of a springy street sign or an umbrella on the beach.
Even aesthetically, the stunning art design feeds directly into the game. They use the edges of each shadow you're able to jump into to communicate heat (shimmering and stretching), time of day (longer shadows at night and precise shadows at mid-day), and even your place in the world as you constantly use perspective shifts to push yourself forward.
There's a simple satisfaction in swimming through and jumping across a line of perfectly aligned shadows that feels Splatoon-like in its execution. The way the schim interacts with new objects was always a fun surprise, and figuring out how they all worked — making cows moo, trash cans toss out litter, and ice cream displays spin wildly — was pure fun, just for the sake of it. It reminded me of the silly interactions of games like Katamari Damacy, and the simple pick up and play nature of its gameplay is reminiscent of that era of gaming.
I was amazed by how cleverly the developers stretched the shadow concept to its absolute ends in level design.
It's a fairly breezy game, clocking in at just 4-5 hours long, and its Dutch-inspired setting make it a perfect summer single-sitting game. It's easy for most anyone to pick up, and it's best when you take a more wandering approach rather than a linear focus on the goal ahead of you. But challenge is there if you seek it out.
Some of the game's hidden secrets in each level — objects you need to find to help bring other schims back to their homes — are extremely tricky. I found just around half of them by the time I was done, and some of the precise leaps needed to get to them truly tested my shadow jumping abilities.
After beating the game, you're given the option to unlock even more difficult options: only one jump; no checkpoints; "risky mode," where you have to beat the game with only a set amount of lives. Each one adds on layers of intense difficulty that I'm curious enough to poke at for challenge runs moving forward. Especially considering the game's compact run time, the part of me that's been interested in speedrunning sees some interesting potential here. To get the perfect line through levels, both RNG and perfectly executed shadow jumping are needed, and it could be a lot of fun to pull that off.
The beauty in darkness
SCHiM isn't without a few imperfections, of course. As clever as its level designs are, and as fun as those interactions are, the game never quite steps out of its comfort zone. There are some fun concepts in the very beginning where you use your schim to help get your human across streets and have to make your way back to them afterward; it showed off the potential intrigue of the two characters working in tandem, and I wished it had been explored further. But for the most part, if you stick to the core path, SCHiM's simplicity can lose its appeal.
On top of that, there are a few moments of wonky shadow physics that suddenly shut a run down, and checkpointing is confusing in its execution — so something completely out of your hand can suddenly send you back to the start of a level in a blink. Getting back to where you need to after those failures is never too difficult, but minor annoyances in something otherwise so simple and clean stand out even more.
What you're doing from minute one is essentially what you're doing at the very end, and for some, that might not hold their interest for too long, but I loved my time in the shadows with SCHiM.
It was delightful to see how beautifully realized this shadow-focused reality is. Levels are washed in simple monochromatic color palettes. Objects and people are given simple textures, and it's always clear which areas you're free to jump into. And each assigned color palette helps communicate the tone and vibe of each stage, making the most out of the minimalist art design. And if you don't like to look of a stage, you're able to to completely customize the palette of any stage. That's rad.
Top that all off with a soundtrack that is just as bouncy and playful as the schim itself and you've got another perfect example of a game achieving artistic synergy on all fronts. Moonsailor uses youthful-sounding instruments like melodicas and xylophones to constantly keep the playful energy up, and the atmosphere is just right for what SCHiM is trying to pull off.
If you were a kid who jumped over cracks, who found games in the mundane world around you, who made shadow puppets with regularity, SCHiM is all about capturing that joy and imagination again.
Ewoud and Nils have crafted a special little game that has brought this writer right back to his childhood, when I'd find ways to gamify the world around me. I find myself glancing at the shadows in my world, wondering about the path I could craft to get from one end of the park to the other, because of this game. And any game that carries a feeling or a new perspective into your reality is a great one.
SCHiM is a throwback to childhood joy: a reminder that tapping into your imagination and letting yourself experience the beauty of the world around you is necessary for surviving the otherwise draining experience of being an adult in the modern world. It's simple, it's short, it's sweet. And it's one I wholly recommend for gamers of all ages.
Video Games Are Good and SCHiM is . . . GREAT. (8.5/10)
+ a silent film narrative that's simple and satisfying, shadow-based platforming feels great to play, simple aesthetics with great impact
- a few wonky shadow interactions, simpler than expected in some ways
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