It’s my birthday today, and the embargo on a game that rather intrigued me is up, so I can finally talk about it. Developed by Ewoud van der Werf & Nils Slijkerman and published by Extra Nice, SCHiM is a platformer with a rather interesting twist on the genre.

“SCHiM is a game about jumping from shadow to shadow in a relaxing and lively environment. This 3D platformer takes elements of light, shadow & animation and adds them directly to the gameplay, delivering an experience that you will only find in SCHiM.”

First, what is a SCHiM? Well, it’s the soul and spirit of an object or living being. Everything in the world has one, and it should never be separated! Which nicely leads into the set-up for the game. You play as the SCHiM of a human, and the two of you become separated. The entire goal is for you to reunite with your human. Sounds simple enough, and it kind of is… if not for the fact that your human keeps moving around the world, and you can only get about by jumping from shadow to shadow – or SCHiM to SCHiM.

Right from the off, SCHiM grabbed me with its pencil drawing-like and basic, but very striking visuals and the simple but challenging gameplay kept me hooked right up to the end credits. Controlling your SCHiM is uncomplicated and the fact that all you really need to do is jump from here to there means that the core concept is very easy to get into. However, that ease of gameplay can throw up more than a few tricky hurdles to (literally) jump over. When you do jump into a person’s or object’s shadow, you can interact with it. Lots of these interactions are nothing more than a little animation or an audible cue. Maybe you are in the shadow of a car, you hit the interact button and get a car horn “honk!” that has no effect on the game. However, some interactions are key to solving a small puzzle to help you move forward, like turning on the power for lights to create much-needed shadows or using the shadow of a bouncy castle to jump higher and over obstacles.

Oh yeah, there’s a slight puzzle element and now and again, you might just get a bit stuck, so some thinking time may be required as you try to negotiate a tricky jump. You can even rotate the camera and that shift of perspective might just make a previously awkward leap more manageable. When you do jump into the shadow of something/one, you can’t directly control that something/one (aside from a few exceptions). So you just have to go with the flow. Jump into the shadow of a jogger in the park, and you have to go where that jogger goes, and a bird will fly wherever it wants to fly, etc. This can lead to several dead ends (or a secret) and you may find yourself getting lost (in a good way) in the world and enjoying the calmness of the game.

SCHiM is split into bite-size levels, and all you have to do is get from the starting point to the end. The areas are short to medium in length and can range from taking just a few seconds to a handful of minutes to get to the end of. But they’re also semi-open and do allow you to explore a little. There may be more than one route to the end, and you can even find hidden objects to help reunite other lost SCHiMs with their respective owners. Sometimes, doing this can even open up an alternate route to the end.

The colour palette is used brilliantly to convey the time of day, mood and other elements. The simple graphics and zero dialogue makes for quite a relaxing and fun experience. Still, if you’re not a fan of the colour scheme that SCHiM dishes up, you can always change it live, in-game. Not a fan of the blue background or black shadows? Change them to whatever colour you want. There’s a great website that allows you to play around with the colour palette, and it works just as it does in the game, so you can give this a bit of a test run if you like. Just click right here.

Released in just a few days on the 18th of this month for Steam and all of the consoles, SCHiM is an utterly engrossing platformer where simplicity is used to great effect. For a game that has no dialogue and no audible narrative to follow, it does an amazing job of conveying emotion and manages to tell a compelling visual story. I was taken back to 40 years ago and being a kid, playing silly games in the park with my friends. Jump over the cracks in the pavement, get from A to B without touching the floor or playing “shadowlands” and only being able to step on the shadows. SCHiM is a playground of child-like wonder captured in a game and presented with a lot of charm and personality.

Do you remember that 2008 to 2012 period of gaming where fantastic indie platformers like Braid, Fez and Limbo started to emerge? It really felt kind of special when you played them – and like you had just unearthed some amazing buried treasure that hardly anyone knew about? Games that you really needed to tell your friends about, and ones where you urged your friends to play for themselves… that’s SCHiM.