Throughout my entire life, I've always been interested in shadows. It's probably got something to do with my autism, but I've always been fascinated by how they originate from 3D space, yet seem to exist on a completely different dimension. I kept looking at shadows all the time as a kid, wondering how they'd all connect together, and how going through a 2D world entirely made out of shadows would be like. And as soon as I saw SCHiM for the first time, I fell in love. "That's just like what I used to see as a kid!", I thought, and I purchased as soon as I could.

This was a mistake.

The best way to describe SCHiM is as a Nothing video game. It feels like the developers came up with an idea one day, and immediately went ahead and made an entire video game without thinking about it any further. It's a poorly designed, mind-numbingly boring experience that never gets better as you play.

Let's start with the story, and SCHiM sure does have one. You play as a schim, which is essentially the soul of anything, attached to one man. One day, after getting fired from his job and getting his bike stolen, the man trips and his schim goes flying off from him. He gets scared and runs away, leaving you stranded without a body. You now have to look throughout the entire city, and find your human so you can reattach yourself before it's too late!

Or at least that's what the description on steam for the game says, because the game does nothing to convey any sense of urgency. The writer tells you that the man you're following lost his soul and you have to help him before something bad happens, but he still helps old people cross the street, goes fishing, tries out new jobs, and overall acts like a decent human being. So what's your purpose in this game? Who knows! The game doesn't care, so why should you? Seriously, I don't think I've ever seen a game where the story it's supposed to tell ends up being so different from what it's showing, it's insane.

And if the narrative is bad, then the gameplay is even worse. This is a 3D platformer where you can only go from shadow to shadow, and you have to use these to your advantage to try and reach the man to reattach yourself. What a cool concept! Would you like to see the kind of obstacles the developers came up with? Yeah, so would I. There is absolutely nothing to this game. No obstacles, no puzzles, and it runs out of new mechanics super quickly. If you see a shadow, you jump to it. If you don't see a shadow, you wait for one to show up and jump to it. Rinse and repeat until the man calmly leaves right before you reach him and the next level loads. This goes on for 64 entire levels.

Ok, that's not entirely true, the game does shake things up a bit every once in a while. For example, in level 28 there's lightning strikes that create shadows for fractions of a second that you have to use to platform, making for some of the most frustrating stages I've seen; and later in the game, you'll get to control a toy truck which lets you create your own shadows, and you even get to solve a perspective puzzle! Of course, this happens in level 64, the final level of the game, which is obviously the perfect time to introduce new mechanics.

The worst part, in my opinion, is the level design because oh my god it's so bad. Levels can either be tiny, or absolutely enormous. There's a ton of dead-ends and alternate paths you can take to reach the end, but the game was clearly not designed with exploration in mind as these feel completely useless. The game also does a terrible job showing you your objective, meaning it's super easy to get lost. Don't worry! You can press a button to show you where you have to go at any point in the level! And it barely works half the time!!!

Oh yeah! You also can interact with certain objects by pressing your second button! This allows you to bounce on springs, throw yourself on swings, etc. Does this open the way for cool and interesting puzzles? I don't know, the game does a terrible job conveying these abilities to you, and I'm pretty sure I ended up brute-forcing my way through half of these "puzzles" without even realizing I could interact with the environment.

Finally, there's the presentation and... it's ok I guess. I think the two-color aesthetic looks really cool, and the models are all very pretty, however the shadow projection and overall lighting can look a bit wonky at times, and since all shadows have color outlines, it can make the game look straight up ugly at many points. Also, the steam description for SCHiM has the word "relaxing" in it, and with that one word you can already predict what the soundtrack for the game will sound like with 100% accuracy. Good job SCHiM, you get some points for having your own identity even though you messed it up slightly. Yay.

No matter how bad a game can be, I always try my best to find something I like. Sometimes a game has a very fun combat system that's ruined by everything surrounding it, or an incredible style that never gets the chance to shine. But SCHiM? I cannot think of a single thing that I truly liked about it. It failed in every aspect possible. Not the movement, the level design, the difficulty, the story, the graphics, the collectibles, the music, the puzzles... Nothing. And sure, as I mentioned before, I've probably thought about this concept more than the developers have so it's very possible that I'm slightly biased. But for the first time in my life, I have found a video game where there was nothing for me worth caring about.

IN CONCLUSION: Don't. 2/10