When a platformer is linear, a players satisfaction is usually driven by getting from A to B with precision, flow and competence. Its about the skill involved to complete the level. When a platformer is opened up a little more, the satisfaction can shift more towards being creative. If you have multiple paths to choose from to get from A to B, its the player making the decision and with it the fun of exploration and trial and error is born. SCHiM lives somewhere between those two places and brings the best of both for a rewarding experience.
SCHiM is a playful 3D platformer that places you in the titular characters role. Every human, animal and object has a shadow and inside the shadow lives a SCHiM. At the start of the game following a fantastic opening montage to get you used to the controls, your human host falls over and you fall out of his shadow. The rest of the game is spent trying to catch him back up and chase him down. Its a fun narrative like a goofy chase movie but with a bit of sadness and loneliness thrown in for good measure. It also sets up the single gameplay mechanic that the game will explore – shadow jumping.
Each level in SCHiM involves an open area or corridor. It might be a street, an intersection, a park, a supermarket or a factory. Each area will have moving parts or people in it and depending on the time of day, their shadows will be cast as they move or walk around. As SCHiM you’ll act like a frog, jumping from shadow to shadow to reach an end object or goal to move on. The beauty is that you can choose how you do it. In a busy street they’ll be benches, bins, bus stops and traffic pillars to leap between. You could try and time a hop into a passing car but the car might turn off down a different road. You could hop from pedestrian to pedestrian, catching the cyclist on the way. All of those might be valid routes, or you might use combinations of them to reach the person or cat or building at the end of the level. Its freeing, experimental and creative to just let your ideas flow. Some levels are more linear than others but almost all of them have some form of playful path forking.
All of this is made effortlessly easy with some easy to understand controls. You aim SCHiM, press and hold to charge your leap and let go to jump. An optional secondary hop is allowed and I’d recommend it for the first playthroughs you do because the optional hard modes remove it and SCHiM’s difficult jumps up quite a lot. With the hop, you can correct mistakes and also open the timing window to make more rhythmic sections of the game easier to navigate. Rhythmic sections often involve robots or factory set pieces, or navigating traffic like a shadow Frogger. It also becomes more important in night time levels. Here you’ll need to leap as car lights shine on objects to create shadows for a few seconds. It is these levels that take skill rather than creativity and add some kick to the gameplay.
To support the simple but rewarding gameplay loop, SCHiM has a bubbly synth soundtrack that’s both relaxing and playful. It reminds me of Otograph’s Pixeljunk Monster’s soundtrack but calmer. Graphically I love the unique blueprint, design outline sketch style. The hues change from level to level and it makes what you can and can’t jump into really clear. If your viewpoint is obstructed you can switch perspective so whilst SCHiM has an isometric view, you can rotate it at your whim. Later in the game it because a critical part of solving levels as long sunset shadows cast in specific directions so you get used to switching things up regularly.
If I were being nit-picky, SCHiM doesn’t add to its core mechanics across the game. Each level will have at least one hidden collectable which is a nice bonus mission but the jumping itself doesn’t change from level 1 to level 57. It didn’t matter much to me as I was really enjoying the creativity and the individual interaction buttons to see what every object in the game does when you take over its shadow. For others where they might get worn out by doing the same thing in different environments, I’d say play SCHiM little and often and it stays fresh.
My takeaway from SCHiM is that a little bit of player freedom to be creative and choose their own path from A to B goes a very long way. As does smooth and easy controls. Some may find the lack of gameplay mechanic variety a little off-putting but the level designs kept me more than amused across its runtime. Clever, carefree and enjoyably satisfying – its like you can choose your own difficulty in what you attempt to do.
Review copy provided by publisher. PC version tested. Out on Steam.
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