Schim's Analysis. The Shadow of What Might Have Been.

A new platform game has been created that will have us jumping from shadow to shadow to find an indistinct location.

What is a Schim? It is a spirit similar to a batrachian that lives in the shadow of a living being or an object. Each one belongs to a single shadow. There are times when this little black frog is separated from its body because of a traumatic event. It feels lost and will do everything it can to find its place.

To overshadow you.

Our humans are developing before our eyes. As the principle of UpIn the early stages of the game, we see our childhood human going through school, university… filling his life with the love of a woman and the dignity of a job, until you lose them. This is the turning point, the moment when life as you know it ceases to have meaning and only nothingness lies before you. The blank page that leads not to a world of possibilities, but to a black abyss. Here, the bond between the Schim and his human is broken. They inevitably separate and the little being begins his search to find his home in the poor boy’s shadow.

Here, the link between the game and the story is broken for the first time.. With this Pixar-style beginning, the opportunity to create the entire tutorial following the story is wasted. He does it in the first two phases and in the following ones, he just moves forward. This will be a trend throughout the game. Schim wastes the use of mechanics to tell the story, with the two sides being well differentiated in almost every phase. This weighs on each scenario be disparate, very short, very long or unusually complicated for this type of game. All this with the common element that we follow the story of our human, but our actions have nothing to do with it. We just chase him.

Who leans near a good tree

The mechanics propose a phase in which our human is at the end. We must navigate through the projected shadows. Like jumping from black puddle to puddle. It doesn’t matter how small, big or whatever shape they are, if there is shadow, you can stay in it. You can also interact with the objects that cast shadows, sometimes in an anecdotal way and others to add playable dynamics and reach seemingly inaccessible areas. At first glance, it may seem like a puzzle game, but the actions are not really varied enough to generate intellectual challenges. At first, they provide food for thought, but once you have assimilated the movements that can be made, it becomes a less thoughtful and more dynamic game.

If I had to choose a genre (which is not mandatory) I would say that Schim is a platform game where jumping, its precision and timing are very important. The first levels are not very demanding and it seems that the relaxed tone of the gameplay It will be extended throughout the game. When you can’t shadow jump, you have a few seconds and an extra jump to do so. Its replay value comes from a one-jump hard mode and the ability to implement a 20-life system that will restart the game once completed. This further reinforces the fact that this is a platform game. and it adds the layer of challenge that the base game needs, if we remove certain phases because suddenly the difficulty curve rises sharply and requires a precision that does not correspond to what has been played so far.

Once again, we see that the game is not well adapted to the story. If these were at least particularly bad moments of our human being, the ups and downs that occur in the very different phases of the Schim would be understood, but as I said, they have nothing to do with each other. The only connection is that the spirit and the human are lost and must find their reason for living. The story is not implemented in the video game and the story itself is neither new nor surprising, which is why it gives a soulless result. Even its eye-catching, almost monochrome art section has no intention on the story.

Conclusions.

Although it is a short game (it lasted 3 hours), so many phases and so many different phases make it too long. This feeling increases when you see that your actions do not make sense with the story they tell you, they do not advance it, it happens in spite of you. That feeling that you are lost and that you are looking for a place to fit in. In this case, it is not the case. The mechanics do not find their place even if it is a striking proposal. In the end it remains like a platform game with little substance.