I loved the beginning of SCHiM. It is unique and creative and there went so much love in all the little details. However, it overstays its welcome a bit too much and it has very hardcore achievements that weren’t for me. None of the achievements are missable.
Approximate amount of time to 100%: Many hours, hard to say how many because of the “Risky” achievement
Estimated achievement difficulty: 9/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 3 or more
Is there a good guide available: Tasselfoot and I wrote this collectible guide.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No, there is level select
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: Yes, after completing the story at least once some extra difficulty settings unlocked
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
I’m so torn apart by writing this review. The game concept is awesome, making a platformer out of jumping through shadows is such a cool idea! And it was so nice to see the Dutch lifestyle and environment in a video game, which felt so familiar as a Dutchy. However, the game is long with 65 levels… too long in my opinion. What doesn’t help with this feeling is that you lose your human very early on and you’ll trying to catch up with him the rest of the game, which gets a bit depressing, as his mood is quite depressing. Around level 30 I was so ready to get reunited with my human, but I had to wait another 35 levels before that happened.
Normally more content is a good thing, but there is a limit before something grows stale. don’t get me wrong, none of the content felt like filler content to me, it tells a story, and later on, going back to familiar settings was nice. However, I think it should have been quite a few levels shorter, especially with the challenging modes that unlock after completion. I felt no desire to go through all the levels again after taking my time to find every collectible.
So what did I like about SCHiM, the concept is so strong, and in the beginning, the game is so happy and funny. (This makes me wonder how much influence the mood of the human had on my feelings toward the game.) It is so clear to me that there went so much love into this game with how many details there are and how you can interact with so many items. Some just make a noise and have a visual effect, others even let you play around with them. Also, all the little details as the color scheme and the size of the shadows during which time of day the level was and how that changed were so nice to see and notice.
SCHiM has a wide range of achievements. A lot of them are for doing different things in levels, for example using the hoose on everybody in a garden in one of the earlier levels. There are also achievements for interacting with every type of object, interacting 50 times with animals, visiting 1k shadows, traveling 500 meters with vehicles, and using a car honk 250 times. Gladly most of those don’t have to be different items, you could just jump into the shadow of a car and honk it 250 times in a row to unlock that achievement. What was very nice to see is that most of those achievements have a progress bar on Steam so you can see how many times you did that already and how many times is left.
SCHiM also has a bunch of quite challenging to even very difficult achievements. As stated above, after finishing the game you unlock some new game modes. One of them is the one jump mode, and there is an achievement to complete all the levels with this mode on. There is also a mode where you don’t have checkpoints, so you have to complete the level in one go. The hardest one is “risky mode’ which gives you a maximum of 20 respawns to get through 65 levels. Getting all the achievements in this game will test your patience and skill level.
I give SCHiM 3 out of 5 stars.
Publisher:
Extra Nice
PLAYISM
Developer:
Ewoud van der Werf
Nils Slijkerman
This review for SCHiM was written on 12 Juli 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 24 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.