A fun and whimsical cozy puzzle adventure with a neat shadow-hopping twist.
SCHiM is kind of based. It’s pretty based!
All based jokes aside, the game is, uh, based on light and dark, in a way. I love perspective puzzles, and I’ve loved this genre since Echochrome, and SCHiM feels like it’s right in my wheelhouse because of the kind of puzzle game it is. We control a little frog-like dude who can only exist in shadows. He is the shadow. He lives in shadows. And when he’s separated from his human counterpart he has to make his way back.
That’s the simple, basic little plot behind the whole experience, giving us a clean purpose to aim towards in each level. The levels themselves kick off with a flyover showing us where everything is and where we need to go, and then we’re off on our merry little way and we just jump. Our initial jump out of a shadow is a pretty good size jump. If we don’t make it to another shadow we get one more half jump before the game resets us to a previous bigger shadow that we were in. It favors the bigger shadows as opposed to smaller ones, and if we stay outside of the shadow for too long then it resets us back again.
So the game really is us constantly trying to find the best path to the next shadow, and there’s some physics and mechanics that go along with that. We’ll be in the shadow of a moving car and the car will stop at a red light, but we need that car to keep going. And the light just doesn’t turn naturally because it’s a puzzle game, so we have to hop out and go into the shadow of the traffic light. We have an action button that we can push that activates it, turning the light green and sending the car off. We then have to hop back into the shadow of the car because the car’s movement will drag us along.
At one point I had to get in the shadow of a duck and make the duck quack over and over again until it made a cat move so the ducks could move on with their day.
That may seem hectic but the game is pretty chill. There’s no timer, there’s no death state, there’s nothing; we can just kind of sit there for a minute and just sort of take it in and look and try to figure out the next step. Or, hop.
SCHiM is just… it’s great. It’s a great little puzzle platformer that scratches an itch that I didn’t know I had right now.
This review is based on a Nintendo eShop code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. The video first appeared on the July 24th, 2024 edition of The SideQuest.
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