Developer: Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman.
Publisher: Extra Nice
Price: Roughly £20.99/$29.99, different platforms and regions may vary on exact price.
Filesize: 700MB - 888.35MB
Website: https://schimgame.com/
Schim is a 3D platformer where you play as some sort of shadow frog known as a schim.
The simple version is that they are a soul and spirit that exist in everything that casts a shadow from objects to living beings.
The story begins as a youngster going to school, riding his bike home, putting out the fire of someone's BBQ and eventually a montage of the youngster growing up into adulthood right after getting his degree from university, this is where things turn sour for the human as he gets fired from his office job, loses is bike and fails to catch the bus. A series of unfortunate events led him tripping over, tearing the "bond" with the schim. Now the schim's goal is to reunite with the human by going through another 50 something levels.
The main gimmick really is that non-shadow parts of the maps are lethal that you respawn to the nearest checkpoint, so the visuals play a huge role to the level design.
These levels can vary in length, with some taking as short as a minute and some going as long as 10 minutes in a first time playthrough. My favourite part of the game is when lights come into play for darker/night time levels to reveal more shadows for schim to navigate through to the other side of the map, it's a neat touch and works well with the game's theme.
A lot of objects are interactable with some being gimmicky such as trash cans spitting out rubbish and then there are the more useful objects such as banners which can fling the schim to the other side. Traffic control does play a huge role in some of the levels, this is to let NPC humans cross the road and let schim use their shadows as they're the only source of "platforms" they can use to cross over.
My least favourite part in the game is trying to hop into NPCs humans/NPCs vehicles (cars/bikes), then holding RT to know where you have to go next and then after letting go RT you find out that your current NPC human/vehicle are going far away from your desired goal as they took a left/right turn a few seconds earlier.
The themes are pretty varied with museum, beach, zoo, farm, box factory but most of the time it's a busy open town area or a isometric neighbourhood with the layout essentially saying it's a single direction. One cool gimmick is a golf course found in the later half of the game where jumping into the golf ball allows the golfer to strike the ball to send both the ball and schim to another location.
The music done by Moonsailor is mostly relaxing with a tense moment when schim gets separated and in my opinion is one of the game's stronger points.
Most of these levels have collectable items, with some being mandatory to pickup to help complete the level while others are optional as they're treated more like hidden items to increase the playtime, especially for completionists. Good luck trying to find all items in wide-open maps as one early game level for example where the human is growing up has some collectable items that are pretty well hidden.
After completing the game, you have access to modify the game's mechanics. The default set is the most accessible approach but if you want a more challenging experience you can disable extra jump to make every jump precise, remove checkpoints and enable risky mode to have a limited set of lives. These difficulty modifiers are there for achievement hunters, I cannot confirm if they're available as in-game achievements for Nintendo Switch players.
Overall the game is okay but it was held back by overstaying its welcome by having far too many levels with slower paced development to the human after losing his schim that I felt pretty bored at times, some levels have questionable checkpoints that I had to retry the level and do a slightly different approach to avoid getting stuck. It does get better near the end both story and level design but it requires going through a good amount of less interesting levels beforehand.
A good schim
+ Neat art direction
+ Relaxing soundtrack
+ Nice interactive features with certain objects.
+ Nice interactive features with certain objects.
+ Some cool puzzles too
+ Completionists will find the hidden collectables a bit challenging.
A bad scam
- Questionable level design at times
- Which can lead to some difficulty spikes
- NPC cars going a different direction when you least expect it as you were trying to figure out where to go next by holding RT (there needs to be an option to freeze gameplay time).
- Some levels being recycled for character development story reasons, though those said levels are releatively short.
Rating: B-
Key provided by Pirate PR
