Where does your soul live? Philosophers and theologians have grappled with the question since ancient times, but SCHiM knows the answer: it’s in your shadow, and it’s called a schim. What’s more, if you lose it, you’re going to have a pretty bleak time.
That exact calamity befalls your human early in the game, and as their schim you have to find your way back to them. For what is intended to be a relaxing game, the story – told wordlessly through cut scenes – is a bit of a downer: failure, disappointment and unfortunate life events never seem to be far away for your human. The schim doesn’t fare much better either: your human is always just out of reach, walking off just as you get near. The narrative isn’t played for laughs, so I found it at best mildly frustrating, and at worst slightly sad.
Which is a weird contrast with the playfulness elsewhere. As a schim – which looks and moves like a frog, with appropriately squelchy animation – you can only survive in shadows. As such you get around by jumping between the shadows cast by the objects in the levels, all of which you can interact with. So dogs can be made to bark, lights to flicker, bins to spew rubbish. There are more practical interactions too: making birds set flight, bouncing off a washing line, lowering a barrier.
The basic mechanics are simple: you have up to two jumps to make it to another shadow. Some levels are as simple as that, and some are incredibly brief; when you add loading screens, cut scenes, and the overview you get at the start of every level, at times it doesn’t feel like there’s very much for you to do.
But those interactions add a puzzling element to many levels, which at their best are clever, surprising and amusing. And more complicated shadows – from either moving objects or flickering lights – add timing and pathfinding challenges to the platforming. There’s a particular satisfaction in bounding up a street between moving vehicles against the flow of traffic. But there are as many times that I was irked by the restrictive camera, absence of signposting, or inconsistent checkpoints. It’s never hard per se, but there were definitely points that I thought it was annoying.
It ends on a high though: the last level is superb. The story culminates in a moment of real substance, adding perceived – though not actual – urgency to the action, which is dense with satisfying platform and puzzle elements.
I’ll choose to remember that one level over the preceding 64.
SCHiM is developed by Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman. Out now on all formats. Published by Extra Dice.