Many games apply frogs as a way to appeal to those who find them cute, and I am one of those people. The humble croaker dominates the wholesome category, where it takes center stage in farming simulators, or as detectives, or as green boys who jump across platforms and damage enemies by swatting them with their tongues.
Schim is different: you play as a shadow frog, not some green attention seeker. And in a mundane world of lively color, you must jump between patches of shadow in search of the human friend whose shadow you have unwittingly been cut off from. What follows is a charming puzzle of both freedom and fluidity, which really makes you look at your everyday surroundings through the bulging eyes of a spectral amphibian. It’s a pretty thing, if perhaps not as emotionally charged as it suggests at first.
Schim’s pretty two-tone palette is a wonderful visual representation of his universe, where ordinary people live their lives and the spirit world coexists alongside them. The shadows in the spirit world are pools of ink that are home to genial Schim: cute frogs who apply their robust hind legs to dart between pools and minimize time spent in direct sunlight so as not to get annoyed. Some, it seems, are Nomad Schim who wander aimlessly. Some are BIG Schim who live in Olympic-sized swimming pools that provide shipping containers. You? You’re a Schim who grew up in someone’s shadow – literally – and due to unforeseen circumstances, you suddenly find yourself separated from it. I suppose that makes you a Schim with a homing missile.
The tutorial is the best part of Schima’s story, a linear series of vignettes in which you’re in the shadow of a compact child on his adorable tricycle. Over time, you see this child grow up. One of my favorite sequences is sitting in his shadow as he walks down the street, the color palette changing as time skips forward. He’s met some college kids, gotten a job, a girlfriend, maybe had a rugged day. In these moments, you learn how to jump between shadows with compact presses, long presses to make substantial jumps, and how to interact with certain shadows to turn off traffic lights, lower barricades, and generally protect your man. It all points to an emotional rollercoaster, perhaps a series of levels where jumping between shadows leads to a deeper understanding of your buddy’s life.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t go in that direction. Instead, the levels become compact, open areas where you just try to catch up with your human. Who is, for the most part, perpetually out of reach, as he commutes to work or wanders around the supermarket looking for the right pizza. You learn a bit about his job and tranquil life at the end, but the creativity of the intro left me wanting more from the actual story.
On the other hand, I’m a sucker for emotional stories, and while Schim doesn’t quite live up to expectations in that sense, it’s still a great time. In your pursuit of your buddy, you’ll have to deal with all sorts of ordinary places turned into pools of shadow, and with that, obstacle courses to run through. Gardens where families picnic and kids run around carelessly. Labyrinthine traffic at busy intersections. Rainy streets where people walk under umbrellas. There’s a lot of variety and, most importantly, little pressure.
What I really like about Schim is his laid-back approach to hiding as a little frog guy. These gardens and streets can be explored at your own pace, and if you ever mess up a shadow jump and end up in direct sunlight for a moment, you don’t die permanently or anything. Instead, you respawn in a fairly forgiving spot and plod along as if nothing had happened. Even as someone with a notorious lack of puzzle-solving skills, I found everything to be pretty uncomplicated, so those looking for earnest puzzles might find that the levels start to blend into one after a while.
This does not mean that the pressure is on entirely absent as you jump. Schim is about darting between man-made inconveniences as if you were an unseen salmon rising up murky patches of scaffolding. It’s about flicking the mouse or shoulder buttons to scope out the area before making those substantial jumps, looking for opportunities to quickly bridge gaps or gently squeezing the material world to tap into your spiritual one. These moments always feel a little magical, like when you jump into the shadow of a Vespa and turn on its featherlight, creating a shadow out of whatever its beam hits. You can make people sneeze, transforming them from moving vessels into well-placed milestones. I particularly liked one level set in a factory where you could raise the arms of a forklift to either stretch gaunt strips of shadow or tip over boxes, providing valuable rectangular checkpoints in long sequences of industrial Frogger.
And while I wouldn’t say the tricks (or the levels themselves) evolve over the course of the game, these are minor annoyances overall. It’s just nice to inhabit the world of a murky amphibian, and to see our everyday world of material objects as places to hide or paths to take. I don’t think the relative ease of solving puzzles should put people off. Instead, it’s a journey worth embracing, and a comforting reminder that there’s always something watching out for us: frogs.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by the game developer.
