SCHiM steps out from the shadows next year

We are happy to announce that Schim is going to be released on PS5 and PS4! Schim is being developed by a team of two: Ewoud van der Werf the lead developer and myself, Nils Slijkerman. I do additional level and game design on Schim. The audio is done by the team of Moonsailor.

In the game you play as a schim, a shadow creature who is trying to get back to the shadow of their person. You’ll travel through ordinary Dutch-inspired locations where you’ll meet other schim and characters you can help and interact with.

In this trailer we show specific ways of interacting with the world, something we haven’t really shown anywhere else yet! In the different scenes you can see that the schim character interacts with objects. As a player you can activate or interact with a shadow by pressing square while being in the shadow of an object.

With Schim, we want to create a world where the player can explore and experiment with various objects and their shadows. Some of these activatable shadows will be little visual or sound-based elements to discover, while others will be part of the flow of the world and will actually change the situation of the player and the characters in the world.

In our new trailer we have lined up some of these examples. In the second scene, the schim of the player arrives in the scene in the shadow of a duck. The duck, however, notices that there is a cat and won’t continue on. The player of the schim jumps over into the garbage truck and uses the shadow interact button (Square on your DualShock 4 or DualSense controller) on the truck, causing the truck to honk its horn and startle the cat, who promptly runs away so the duck can happily waddle along, creating a way forward for the player.

While this example had a specific solution, we are aiming to allow for multiple paths, interactions, and ways to finish a level. In the second scene with a shadow interact, we see the player hopping in a parking lot of a car dealership. The player jumps into the generator, uses the Square button to interact with the shadow and activates the air dancer. The air dancer inflates and creates a new path for the player to use.

In the last scene of the trailer we see another shadow interact. The schim of the player activates the ticket machine multiple times. After a couple of button presses the ticket machine malfunctions and keeps spitting tickets. The barriers go up and down and the cars can’t enter the parking garage. A small traffic jam forms and the player hops along the shadows of the waiting cars. 

We are currently still deep in development, but can’t wait to show everyone the different interactions we’re working on.

We are excited about Schim coming to PlayStation next year and we plan to share more development insights in the future.

* This article was originally published here