SCHiM Review (Switch eShop)

Though 3D platformers often go down the collectathon route to varying success, it can be interesting to see new entries in the genre try something a little different. SCHiM is one such fresh title, eschewing a focus on cartoonish characters, wacky levels, and mountains of things to grab in favor of a semi-narratively driven adventure that just offers a beautiful, artful experience. SCHiM may not be the kind of game that’s ‘fun’ in the way that most other platformers are, but it’ll stick out as a memorable bright spot when you think back through the new releases you tried out this year.

SCHiM’s story is told through a series of pantomimed cutscenes, leaving a lot of room for interpretation. You begin by playing as a shadow frog quietly following the adventures of a young boy enjoying his childhood, and you're right there with him as he rapidly grows up and experiences the various joys and hardships of life. After the poor dude gets dumped and loses his job in a round of layoffs, you're suddenly separated from him, leaving the young man without a shadow. Thus begins your long journey across the shadows of the world to make your way back to him.

SCHiM is best described as a 3D platformer, although that label is rather simplistic given the mechanics here. Your job is ultimately to get your shadow frog to a goal, such as a cat or a child’s bike, by repeatedly chaining jumps between shadows that form a rough path there. If you happen to miss a jump and land in the light, you get a brief grace period and one extra jump to give you a chance to reach the nearest shadow, otherwise, you’ll be sent back to the last shadow you occupied to try again.

To spice things up, you’re occasionally asked to solve some light puzzles by interacting with the objects you possess. A tap of the ‘Y’ button will trigger the thing casting your shadow to do something, whether that be making a duck quack or a pedestrian yawn, and sometimes you’ll need to figure out how to cause something to cast a shadow you can use. One level tasks you with making it to a specific turn signal at an intersection so you can turn the light green and hitch a ride on the shadow of a passing car. Another features lots of construction equipment, and you need to raise forklifts and move flying drones around to maneuver and lengthen shadows into just the right sequence that you can cross. These puzzles are never too challenging, but they introduce just enough variation on the core gameplay to keep things interesting.

The only real downside to this gameplay is that SCHiM doesn’t do a great job of communicating important information to the player. For example, you may be attached to the shadow on a kid’s bike and think you’re making progress, only to be suddenly ripped out into the sun because the kid crossed an invisible barrier. It’s also never made clear to you exactly where the checkpoints are in a level, and deaths sometimes can have discouraging results when your frog gets sent back way farther than you thought it would. Such issues don’t ruin SCHiM outright, but they do make the experience a little more tedious and frustrating than it needs to be.

And though this isn’t strictly a positive or a negative feature, SCHiM feels like it’s a little more focused on its overall aesthetics and ‘feeling’ rather than on delivering compelling gameplay. The quiet and often peaceful environments are enjoyable to explore and offer a nice atmosphere, but the experience you have when interacting with them is rather stagnant because the difficulty curve stays almost completely flat and new ideas or stage gimmicks are few and far between. If great moment-to-moment gameplay is the main thing to attract you to a game, then you may find that SCHiM is a little lackluster. The focus here is more on aesthetics.

Sometimes this focus even affects the gameplay, such as how the camera can be a little difficult to work with in some scenes. You can use the shoulder buttons to get one of four isometric viewpoints on your frog, but every now and then we encountered portions of a level where every viewpoint either was obscured by a building or didn’t give the clearest view of the potential shadows we could jump to next. Such instances weren’t common enough to get in the way of progression, but they popped up just often enough to be noticeable—we would’ve preferred a camera system here that gave a little more control over its positioning.

For its graphics, SCHiM employs a gorgeous two-tone art style that makes practically every screen a minimalistic visual treat. Each level utilizes a different primary and accent color to help differentiate its environments from its predecessors, while the contents are characterized by simple linework and lots of negative space. Any lack of detail in the models themselves are made up for with the smooth animation work, which really brings each scene to life as pedestrians amble about and cars zoom down the street.

This simple art style is then matched by an equally chill instrumental soundtrack that employs lots of piano notes and basic melodies in setting a relaxing and friendly atmosphere. It’s the kind of soundtrack that you often forget is even there, but in a good way, because it melds so perfectly with the general vibe of each level.