In the opening levels of SCHiM, you watch a child grow up, and you grow alongside them – you’re playing as their shadow, after all. As they get older, you experience their milestones, moments of joy, sadness, togetherness, loneliness. You learn the game’s basic controls, which allow you to hop into other shadows and trigger an interaction with the objects, people or animals you’re occupying. You also grow attached to the unnamed child – eventually, the unnamed adult – you’re quite literally shadowing.
Following a particularly bad day, this person’s shadow is accidentally detached from them. Your objective across the game, naturally, is to find your way back to your human, and to do so you’ll have to hop your way between shadows across several dozen small levels, interacting with objects and timing your jumps to progress through each area.
When I look back on my time with SCHiM, I a handful of cool moments, clever puzzles, and frustrating sections. But mostly, I pressing the “X” button on my DualSense over and over to keep jumping between shadows. Jumping is a core, fundamental part of so many games, and SCHiM certainly has a good jump. It’s a long, generous, pleasantly floaty jump, one that feels appropriate for a shadow. But unlike many games in which jumping is a core mechanic, you’re not chaining together moves, or jumping over obstacles, or really doing much more than following the path the game has set out before you, moving between shadows to reach the one that will trigger the end of the level. SCHiM has an interesting premise, but over time it begins to feel quite samey.
SCHiM is largely the work of two developers, Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman, and before digging into the review proper it’s worth highlighting that making a functional, original game as a tiny team like this is a massive achievement, especially when the game looks gorgeous and is full of clever ideas. Even when I am not enjoying a game – and there are absolutely stretches of SCHiM that I did not really enjoy – it’s worth keeping in mind the circumstances under which it was made, and SCHiM is certainly an impressive accomplishment.
Visually, SCHiM really stands out. Each level has a different colour palette, with objects rendered in simple detail, making the shadows you’re travelling through feel vital and alive (they frequently are alive, in fact, but they never seem to mind you visiting). I enjoyed checking out each new environment and seeing how the game used colour to indicate different times of day. I wish SCHiM had done more with this, there are a few “night” levels where shadows are hard to come by, but oddly only the first one you encounter really feels like a puzzle that needs to be solved.
You can tap a button to “interact” with objects once you’re in their shadows. Most of them are just for fun – a bin spits out rubbish, a container shakes, a cat meows. Sometimes these interactions are essential for progress. Changing a traffic light might make traffic flow, letting you leap into a car’s shadow to move forward, just to give one example of a thing you’ll have to do several times throughout the game. Every now and then, a shadow will have certain properties – the shadows of powerlines and some other cords are bouncy, and some objects can be stretched to fling you forward. A bird might take flight once you’re in its shadow, and activating an object that lights up at night will give you access to new shadows.
There are moments like these scattered throughout the game, and there were several points when I encountered an exciting mechanic and wondered “Is the game about to really kick off?” But then I’d hit yet another level where progress was dependent on waiting a long time for a car or pedestrian to go past, or one with a lot of fiddly jumps required, or a string of short, samey levels across environments I’d already visited. There’s a lot of sitting and waiting in SCHiM, hoping that you’ll be able to time your jumps when a car finally es by the road you need to cross, or that an NPC will let you catch a ride with them. Many levels end before they feel like they’ve really begun, giving the game an odd, staccato rhythm.
SCHiM is short, yet it feels padded, like a great two-hour game that has been stretched to four hours. A lot of the levels are simple a series of quick jumps between shadows, whereas it feels like only a handful ask you to be a bit more clever, or to think laterally. There are hidden objects scattered through most levels if you want to explore them, but there’s no real reward for collecting them all aside from an a trophy/achievement.
There’s one detail about SCHiM that absolutely drove me up the wall, and it’s one where I suspect mileage may vary. The game is, ostensibly, about trying to get back to your person, and it doesn’t take long before you spot them in the distance in a level. For most of the game, your human is just slightly out of reach, and often the course you take through the level actively takes you further away from them. As a player, you’re acutely aware that if this was all really happening, you could simply wait outside the building they’ve entered and re-enter the blank void beneath them as they by. There are many such moments in the game.
This narrative decision means that the game perpetually feels like it’s about to end, and like you’re repeatedly failing at what should be a pretty simple task. It makes the shadow’s motivations feel unclear. There are multiple cutscenes during the game in which the shadow could have easily reached their person, and the game only engages a little bit with the cost of this human being separated from the player character. I found it incredibly frustrating feeling like the game was continuing arbitrarily past the point where the two should have reunited. It soured the entire experience for me, but I can imagine other players finding this less frustrating, especially if they know to expect it.
SCHiM is a game with a lot of great ideas – and it ends well with a cool final level – but it also feels like a game that would have benefited from being a bit shorter and sharper, with a greater investment in storytelling and exploring the possibilities of its more clever mechanics. It’s a game that makes the case for its own potential without necessarily delivering on it. Perhaps one day, an improved sequel will emerge from its shadow.
