Once you get over the terrifying idea that your shadow is not only alive, but also capable of wandering around on its own, SCHiM is a delightful and whimsical indie game that gently plays with your preconceptions.
As with the best games, SCHiM’s central mechanic needs very little explanation. Schims are a person’s soul or spirit. They are capable of leaving their owners body – is that creators? Do we ‘create’ our spirits? – taking on the form of adorable inky frog-like creatures. These can hop from shadow to shade, but never out in the open on their own for long, with a tether to their owner ensuring that they snap back to their original location.
The opening of the game takes you through a person’s early life, with you and your Schim – who is fundamentally your shadow – initially riding tricycles, jumping on trampolines and generally having a good time, before steadily growing up, taking in highlights like graduation and meeting a girl, before experiencing some of the less enjoyable aspects of life like break-ups and getting fired from your job.
That’s when you have ‘the incident’. While running for a bus your person falls over, somehow severing the connection between him and his Schim, and on discovering that he’s somehow shadow-less, he panics and runs away. This leaves you to make your shadowy way back to your owner, hopping, bouncing and skulking through the shade.
All of this storytelling is done without a single line of dialogue or text, and it’s done with a clear sense of intent and purpose, as well as a playful eye for how to tell a story without words. The simple but elegant art style helps here, and the world has a solidity and a realness to it that feels utterly grounded, while the shadow creatures have an adorable Ghibli-esque charm to them. You’ll nestle in amongst other shadows as you invade their turf, and little touches such as cars’ larger, sleepier shadows eyeing you with annoyance really brings Schim to life.
Despite playing like a platformer, Schim is as much a puzzle game as anything else. Working out your route towards your objective can be fiendishly difficult, and there were times my sanity started to fray. You can make one expansive leap from a shadow, and if you don’t immediately land on another one you can make a drastically shorter second jump. This is often handy for making a slight correction, but no use whatsoever if you’re stuck with a large area to try and clear.
You can back yourself into a bit of a shadowy hole at times, and while you can restart each level, that can mean losing a bunch of progress. It doesn’t happen too often though, with a solution eventually showing itself. There’s multiple ways for your shadow to interact with the world, from bouncing on power cables to switching traffic lights, and its these that open up the path ahead. Sometimes it’s just a change of perspective you need, swinging the camera around to reveal an unseen shadow lurking behind a bin.
Some of the frustration is melted away by the tuneful electronic soundtrack that gently tootles along in the background. It feels especially Nintendo-like in nature, reminding me of the background noodling in 51 Worldwide Games, with an emphasis on the soothing side of things. SCHiM is a vibe, and I really bought into it.
While they’re utterly different games, SCHiM has the same gentle touch as Untitled Goose Game, and that’s the closest, and greatest comparison I could make. It’s not mechanical, but there’s an atmosphere and a sensation that the two titles share, not least in puzzling out the way forward, and the release of calming endorphins when you work it all out.
