Schima Review

There was a real trend around 2007 for indie puzzle platformers, usually about a melancholy boy who for some reason had to move from the left side of the screen to the right. While it’s not a 2D platformer, Schim reminds me of that era when indie games were all about taking a single mechanic and then expressing it through a different iteration on each level, while still squeezing as much emotional weight out of the story as possible on a budget.

In Schim, you play a shadow creature that can’t exist in the featherlight and must hop from one pool of darkness to another, as if you were playing a gothic Frogger. With eyeballs poking out of the shadows as you swim through them, the main character has a bit of a frog about him. You occasionally see other shadow frogs jumping in other shadows, and giant ones lurking in the darkness under trucks and the like. But you’re more of a regular shadow frog, one who lives in the shadows cast by one person—until you’re separated, embarking on a quest through the city to find your way back to the melancholy boy whose silhouette you call home.

Sometimes jumping is just a matter of timing. You wait for a car, cyclist, or box on a conveyor belt to pass by so you can jump into its shadow, then jump into the next one. You can also interact with objects and creatures whose shadow you’re in, pressing buttons to open doors or change traffic lights, or raising the arms of a forklift to extend its shadow so you can run to the edge and jump before it falls. This is Schim at its best, when you’re honking like a duck to a cat or turning on streetlights to create modern shelters to move through. (The latter is necessary, because there’s no shelter in the true darkness of night, which is just as deadly as sunlight. You don’t need the absence of featherlight, but the shadows it casts.)

The city—and bits of countryside—you traverse are distinctly Dutch, much like creator Schima. Some of the maps could be almost any video game city where cars drive on the right, but occasionally you’ll see a parked bike hanging off the side of the bridge it’s chained to, or a remarkably neat park, and you’ll realize you’re in mainland Europe. I wish there was more of that local color, especially once you leave it behind for a generic factory level or something similar.

At the beginning of each chapter, you’re given a long view of a map, zigzagging across the route you’ll be taking. But you don’t have to plan your path ahead of time, because it’s almost always clear where you need to go. Painfully, in fact. While you might expect the interactions to turn into brain-twisting puzzles or complex jumping feats, they never do.

The scheme remains simple enough to suggest that it’s designed for relaxation, not intensity, and yet these long pans through the level don’t make me feel relaxed at all. They make me feel drained, each one showing where the melancholy boy you’re following has gone next, to a position you know he’ll leave before you get there. Each level ends with a numb “princess in another castle” foreshadowing the next.

That feeling really caught me off guard when I returned to Schim after a break to find that I’d lost an entire level of my progress. Playing through the map again and trying out different things revealed that, aside from a few collectibles hidden in dead ends that you wouldn’t bother with if you weren’t an achievement hunter, there’s nothing really to Schim about beneath the surface. The closest thing to a challenge comes when you have to quickly turn the camera because you’ve passed an object in moving shadow that won’t be there for long, and the closest thing to a relaxing experience comes when you find a vehicle heading in the right direction and can briefly take your hands off the controls as it takes you where you need to go.

Stripped down to its best moments, Schim would have been an impressive college game, but stretched to the lengths required by full-priced boutique indies, it becomes a drag. The inventive puzzle platformers of the 2007 era cast a long shadow, and Schim doesn’t do enough to escape from under it.