SCHiM

I liked the demo and love the style and content, but yeah, the finished product is just tedious and about 30 levels too long. Suffers a bit of an identity crisis - most levels are rather chill and easy affairs, but then every so often you get gimmick levels that do offer some challenge but often end up with you waiting forever for the right opportunity where multiple NPCs line up in the right way at the right time to make a certain section possible, which was just frustrating. Pacing-wise it feels like level concepts were just thrown together, the idea might have been to throw the player a few chill sections in between the more challenging ones, but it just left me bored and confused. Should either have been a far shorter chill experience with more story / exposition, or a game with a lot less levels that built up more of a challenge as it went on, like the similar but much better Ynglet. A shame really, it has a very charming Europeanness in it's visual style and ambient beats soundtrack - I did want to like it, but the gimmicks just got increasingly annoying by level 28 and I had felt like I hadn't really had much fun.

I remember when I saw an announcement for this game, years and years ago. I loved the sparse colors, the concept of leaping from shadow to shadow and interacting with items. I was eager, and bought it nearly as soon as I could, but I let it sit in my library, as happens with many steam games. Well! Gave it a run today! And...it's a better concept than a game, I fear. The interactions with the shadows aren't as plentiful or as interesting as I'd expected. The sparse colors are sometimes okay, sometimes just kind of muddled. Dead ends aren't telegraphed, and you end up waiting around for long stretches of time for that right person or car, and sometimes you get reset VERY far back. The direction guide sent me backward several times when I'd reached what should have been the end goal (and was later revealed to be). I think I'd gotten there in a route the game hadn't expected and was annoyed I hadn't triggered the correct shadow, making me go back (not easy, as the cars and people generally didn't allow for backward travel, just forward travel), only to have to spin back around immediately and get back to where I'd been the first time. The man I'm chasing, well. I got fed up with him real fast. There's something so obnoxious about your goal being just out of your reach. He's standing there eating ice cream and I have this tension and drive to get back to him, it feels so important to be with a broken shadow...but he doesn't seem to mind, and he's really annoying, somehow. His life isn't going great, but at the same time he's out there fishing on the side of a busy road? And then just...walks away, leaving me to need to climb into a goose or an old lady or a car. I wonder why I'm putting in so much effort when he's gonna be long gone by the time I get there. And that feels bad, somehow. To never, ever, ever get to your goal? This tantalizing thing you cannot have? The goal just wanders away? Something about that sticks unpleasantly. Feels really bad, to never get your goal and have to settle for whatever is walking in the general right direction. At one point, I did get a little stuck--the timing of the lightning struck level made me wonder if I was forcing my head against a dead end or if this was truly the way to go. So I thought I'd check. I skipped to the end of a walkthrough video, assuming I was nearly there........only to realize the level I needed was *in the middle of the playthrough* ......oh. If this had been an hour long, it would have been great. The three hours I see it takes overstays its welcome. Its repetitive, the goal is maddeningly frustrating, the way to go is obscured and often not what you'd expect, and the waiting for just the right thing to pass so you can climb aboard is laggy. You need to be in the right frame of mind to play this game. And I am not. I found it too tedious for more than a novelty runtime, and I really hate my shadowless man. Eat your soggy pizza alone and let me go play with the ducks.

The concept behind this game is really cool: the time of day affecting the lengths and positioning of the shadows, the complexities of shadow being affected by different lighting sources, one level introducing a bit more difficulty with there being a raging storm and certain shadows only being visible during quick lightning strikes! And theoretically there should be a good motivation for going through the environments they’ve put forth between you and the end of the level; you’re specifically the shadow of a human with whom you’ve been separated, and as you’re trying your best to reunite he is unawares and keeps on moving further and further away from you. So why am I leaving a negative review? I got about halfway through the levels available for the main story and decided that I just. Needed to put the game down. I honestly should’ve just hung my hat on it a lot earlier, but I had been so excited about SCHiM that I felt like I really needed to give it a fair shot before I could say without hesitation that I wasn’t having any fun. - The controls are extremely finicky and sometimes just won’t do what they’re meant to - it’s incredibly frustrating when the only way forward relies on you waiting a significantly long amount of time before the right shadow slowly waltz’s by your location - the environments and ways to progress feel very samey and wildly switch between being incredibly easy to incredibly difficult, as opposed to a natural progression of difficulty picking up on skills and techniques you would’ve learned during previous puzzles - And finally the story just. Isn’t catching me like I thought it would. I had some sympathy for the shadow’s human counterpart at the beginning as it seemed like he was just being subjected to rough patch after rough patch, but since then I have frequently cursed him out as I realized what should’ve been a quick end to the game got extended because in the five seconds it took for me to get to his very stationary location he was suddenly nowhere to be seen. (He was literally fishing one time, five seconds to get to his fishing spot and he’s just gone?!? Another he was sitting on a bench eating a whole freshly bought pizza by himself and somehow ate it all in five seconds?!?) I accepted the difficulty in being able to locate him in time at the end of the first day, begrudgingly allowed for the inability to follow him into the hotel the second day, but a third day of not being able to finally reunite with him and instead sleep outside when I very clearly was not barred from entering buildings?? I couldn’t understand it. I don’t fully grasp the shadow thing, either, or what the motivation is for it to try so hard to reunite with its human. There’s a sense of urgency that is immediately clashed with. No sense of urgency? Again, just giving up and sleeping outside at the end of the night instead of continuing to hop and skip through shadows trying to locate the human once he’s finally forced to be perfectly still. Walking around with no shadow doesn’t appear to have negatively affected him in any way, no one even seems to notice. Being separated from a specific object as a shadow doesn’t seem to have any negative effects or consequences either. So why am I trying so hard to reunite with him? Why isn’t some other little frogger guy taking up residence in the vacancy? Why can’t I just settle down in some other shadow? If I’m specifically meant to be his one and only shadow, fates tied since his birth, shouldn’t something be happening as a result of us being separated? Should I be thinking about it that hard? Maybe not, especially as it is negatively impacting my motivation for playing, but I can’t help thinking about it. So if I’m not having fun with the mechanics, if I’m not engaged by the story, if the puzzles are kind of just. bleh, then why am I forcing myself to keep playing? This is kind of weird for me. I really really really wanted to love this game. But I just don’t. Since it is their first game, though, and they clearly had a really stellar concept that just happened to fall flat in execution, I hope that they don't give up, take what they've learned from SCHiM, and continue to put great ideas out into the world.

It's a cute concept, but not interesting enough in execution. The intermittent vehicles/cars/people make it hard to understand what's a dead end and what's just a long wait until the useful person comes back around. The pointer towards your goal will choose random intermediate objects to focus on even when you've passed them and what passes for a story is just "You saw the goal, but it moved by the time you get there." And most of the time the replacement that ends the level is a random cat, bike, truck, old lady.

neat concept but uninteresting execution

it gets bit too repetitive and not much variation ...

The gimmick of this game is what initially caught my attention. Needing to jump between shadows as a sort of unique platformer was an interesting concept that I was wiling to try. The game is also made with a lot of care and passion, with the actual controls feeling pretty good. There was some sort of story about mental health and finding your purpose or something, but I didn’t care too much about that. The only thing about this game that kind of bugged me was the level design. Some levels were really long, some were really short, some were really easy, and some were strangely difficult and annoying. It didn’t really scale up as you get farther into the game as you’d expect. I found that the only way I could actually complete this game was to play it in small sessions since I’d get annoyed if I played for too long.

It's a cute game though I will say it felt a little too long at parts. I know everyone and their mom loves long games but I feel like this would've made a bigger impact on me if it was like half as short imo. The story itself is also kinda cute but I feel like there were places where it could have been stronger using the unique concept. But either way this is a great game and so I recommend it.

Как бы тут не ругали игру за однобразие,мне дико нравится.Шикарная задумка,классная реализация и интересный геймплей.Милая маленькая история о маленьком теньке в большом городе. Я в процессе закрытия игры на 100% и мне очень нравится.Игра крутая и потраченных денег, лично мне,не жаль.(куплено было по скидке),с игрой стоит ознакомиться,авторам желаю дальнейших успехов! 8 шимов из 10!

I enjoyed playing with the color change feature and experimenting with 4 color palettes