The Most Unique Platformer You'll Play All Year - SCHiM Game Review
357I forgot to say in the script, I got this via review code, but they had zero say over the content of the vid.
Try The Game Here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/15...
Music used from the game by Moonsailor:
https://moonsailor.bandcamp.com/album...
Join my discord (don't forget to drop a comment here too!): / discord
Script
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Schim is a game that until now has only existed in the collective imagination of every child who's ever lived.
As such it also has the same review score as most childhoods. Mixed! Son of a bitch. Since writing this joke it went to mostly positive. I'm glad tbh that mixed score was a hate crime I'm my opinion. The boxart alone is better than most games are in their entirety.
Schim is about a little shadow spirit that's lost it's owner and must hop it's way back to them without landing in the light. It's floor is lava for kids that didn't have furniture.
You can tell this game is European because it has impeccably clean design and a character with a clearly visible penis.
The devs can try and say it's an ink glob but I can see through you as easily as I can read your name Ewoud van der Werf, and Nils Slijkerman.
This games intro is a masterclass in quickly onramping you both mechanically and emotively with no dialogue.
There's a demo on steam you should definitely check out before splashing on it, it'll show you exactly what I mean. The demo is about 20 minutes with a mix of levels while the full game is about 4 hours, not including challenge runs and bits and bobs hunting. Completionists say it takes 2 or 3 runs to polish off but personally I'm here for a good time not a long time.
I got the game on switch because I figured it was the natural habitat of a game this cute and easy.
The main action is jumping. Landing in the light gives you a window of time to do a smaller slower jump to correct your shot or get to a shadow that was always slightly out of reach. This can be turned off in NG+ for more difficulty.
Pressing Y interacts with whatever you're in the shadow of. This causes all sorts of cute interactive moments. Sometimes entirely useless like rattling a gate or making someone sneeze. Other times it can get machinery working or billboards and umbrellas to fling you.
Right trigger will drag the camera to your objective, with no text explanations, which is both a blessing and a curse. And sometimes I just don't trust it at all to be sending me in the right direction. This whole game is the embodiment of a well intentioned mime.
The devs have a knack for creating believable spaces for you to sink into. People wander past, their shadows acting as platforms to carry you to the next place. Vespers (EURO TRASH) putter around and traffic waits for you to change the lights. Also very European. Here in new Zealand a red light means drive faster because getting home 2 minutes faster to have a screaming domestic with the wife is definitely worth the risk of death.
Schims are all over the place living their own little lives and playing with shadows. In the evening they gather under some cast iron with a lamp above it that casts a shadow all night so they can survive. Have these Schims lost their people too?
The world feels decently populated and alive despite the clean aesthetic. I think The best platformers avoid making you wait around too much, but since a lot of Schim relies on you being a helpless critter waiting for handy shadows in a clockwork world, there can be some nose picking moments and a few sequences that can be frustrating to time, like intermittent thunderstorm flashes.
But there's no death screen, just a reset back to where you were previously.
Since this is an Indy game with stark shillouttes, yes there's light themes of depression. But it's also about the things that carry us through life, relationships and people, our passions and commitments. Or a pigeon. Some of it takes us to a dead end like a job we never enjoyed. But there's always another route, and it might just be a matter of finding where we took a wrong turn to find the thing we truly enjoy.
The game does a good job of exploring as many ideas as it can to stretch the concept and promptly finishes when it's done. There's no level padding to extend playtime. This game finishes faster than I do.
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Big Rat Hole presently has 2,758 views for SCHiM across 1 video, with his channel publishing less than an hour of SCHiM content. This makes up 1.79% of the content that Big Rat Hole has uploaded to YouTube.