Really really addictive and excellent at killing time.
If that is a good or a bad thing is up to you.

Personally I had to drop it for those reasons.
Still unsure why I picked it up in the first place.
I managed go my entire life before this without ever knowing what exactly a Full House is, yet the month I fast traveled through by spending my valuable free-time exclusively with Balatro made that shit appear in my dreams.
Curse you Nothernlion and curse that part in the human brain that likes to see numbers go up more than anything. Releasing that Demo was an insanely smart business move, shit had me hooked from that moment on till I snapped myself out of it.

Idk, maybe Poker just always sucked ass. Maybe the same with roguelikes that are designed to keep you playing endlessly without any regard for how disgusting that actually is.

Probably the perfect example of:
Conceptually interesting, but actually disappointing in execution.
Well, Schim looks pretty at least.
Pretty enough for me to finish it and write out a bunch of scattered thoughts and rants below.

First off, near the end the levels got significantly more creative (my favorite ones were the beach, the farm, the golf court and the museum. The Zoo was also kinda neat and I believe if the entire game was as tightly designed and as creative as the final I'd have really liked it), but too late too little imo and I honestly just wanted it to end at that point.

Secondly and way before I'll get into anything tangible, to me it feels weird to have such a high-concept magical idea: 'every human has a shadow frog creature following us our entire life' (it's even implied that inanimate objects have them too and that they are autonomous) and then do almost nothing with all that in the narrative and instead solely focus on vague gestures towards a coming off age into "corporate life makes me depressed" story and that Pixar classic "find your way back to your owner" plot, the last of which got stretched out aggravatingly long.

Come on.

Risk something.

Embrace that unconventional, fantastical way of viewing the world which the core mechanic and its framing promises.
Explore the ideas you confront us with.
Don't just check of all the boxes every mediocre indie game seemingly feels the need to check off. That somber and inoffensive Ost also isn't convincing me to feel any different.

Idk, for instance one random question I couldn't help but have in the beginning was, how come when our guy is missing his shadow frog it obviously affects him a lot (MFer turns blue and behaves low energy), but whenever we jump into someone else's shadow, also meaning we share that space with their creature for that short moment (right?) it doesn't seem to do anything. (unless ofc I press the obligatorily existing, from time to time and depending on the object, mildly entertaining interact button, but like what does even that actually do to the humans other than trigger their "confused"-animation ?)
Might feel like a silly question, but like, imo there is at least something more interesting here and in similar questions like it, which all could have been explored narratively and maybe even mechanically instead of all the safe, by the numbers shit.

One thing I'll have to admit is that I'll always admire when games tell a story without any words, no matter if it was a miss for me personally.
I still appreciate it out of principle. (Although maybe they just didn't have any confident writer on the team. Yes, before you ask, they didn't credited anyone for the writing. lmao why am I such fucking hater rn sorry)

The longer the game went on the more often something about a scene would look a bit off and I pretty quickly realized that was because selectively important shadows were excluded to railroad the player on an intended path.
Houses never cast a shadow in Schim, because that would make the game too easy, or rather, way harder to level design. The side of a board walk and similar set dressings got their own type of brighter shadows for the same reason.
Why render railings, canals or geometric depth in architecture for immersive, "populating the world" reasons just to then accidentally achieve the opposite by ignoring that those things obviously would also cast shadows in real life.

Isometric platforming in general often feels a tad annoying to control, because it messes with our depth perception in a weird way and it feels kinda weird to always steer diagonally. Being able to turn the camera attempts to help alleviate this, but more often it kinda does the opposite for me, because additionally to the fact that most of the other three available perspectives always seem to be obscured by something, it also accidentally shows to me just how much more I'd desire completely free camera movement by almost being that, by for a split second exposing its superiority in that moment it takes to turn to another isometric angle.
I guess it looks kinda interesting, more unique, but should that really be a priority in a platformer?
Well, it's not a deal breaker by itself I guess, but these questionable game design decisions kept on stacking for me.

I liked the idea of inverting the gameplay of Frogger present throughout the game especially the part that had it written on its sleeve. But even then, the platforming in those sections often felt like I was swimming stream upwards, or like I got flung around by cars driving too fast, or caught between the wheels too much for it to feel satisfying to play.
It's also weird how the traffic light mechanic they introduced in the beginning suddenly wasn't there anymore. Like, there still is an indicator if the light is telling traffic to go or stop, but we can't use it in those levels. The cars just keep on going anyway and I really don't get why that mechanic was a thing then in the first place if the game is just gonna ignore it existed an hour ago.
They actually have the gull to reintroduce that same mechanic a couple levels later lmao like none of that happend.

I liked those little color palette transitions and jumps in time whenever the player character was walking behind a tree in the beginning chapter.
The color palette changes each level kept the complementary color schemes fresh for the eyes and, like I already said, I think the artstyle singlehandedly kept me from quitting or shelving Schim.
Maybe also my knowledge that its playtime is short enough to speed run through in an afternoon.

Another nitpick (I am really good at those if you couldn't tell already lmao), when I was borderline speedrunning the game there appeared this dissonance whenever the blue MC managed to waddle away from me for over an hour in real-time. Like, I was right next to him in under a minute in a bunch of sections, but as soon as I got there a cut scene made me stand still and watch him slowly escape again and again.
Homie was even able to microwave a pizza in like five seconds just so I couldn't catch him.
Even when I wasn't rushing, those "here, observe without any agency how he slips through your fingers again" cut scenes were bugging me a lot.
Clearly the devs just wanted to stretch out that part of the game/gameplay, but it felt really silly and kinda infuriating to do it in that specific way.
(I wrote this halfway through without realizing that this will go on for the entire fucking game)

Oh yeah, I had to restart more than one level because a bug I didn't realize was one prevented me from progression.
Maybe I broke it by "speedrunning " tho, who knows. And I honestly can forgive jank in indie games, I just thought I should mention it.

Invisible walls are a game design sin to me, especially when it's seems so easy to find a different solution. I don't get why the chapters with the human have so many of them. Hell, even as a frog with limited movement range I ran into quite a few.

Idk I guess I am on my hater arc rn or some shit.
Hope other folks get/got more out of this then me.

I also wanna emphasize and remind myself and whoever might read this that any indie dev who actually manages to finish and ship their game is fucking God period.
No amount of unhinged ranting should take that away imo.
Writing a review like this is the reactionary and easy thing to do.
Coming up with an idea in your head and bringing it to life is worth more than a trillion of these.
I am genuinely interested for whatever this team does next I just hope they play it less safe earlier on, don't wait till the end for the good stuff and maybe get a proper writer on board.

ngl I now understand the hate for Johnathan Blow's work.

Fiddly, dissatisfying gameplay paired with clunky level design.
Inspired by the least interesting parts of mario games and the most insufferable parts of straight break-up stories. An oversaturation of incoherent mechanics and often annoying to exectute solutions.
Babies first attempt at connecting theme and narrative to gameplay.

Next one is definetly a nitpick, but why tf do all these thick green books each only have a single paragraph in them? is it really more important to advance the text by walking to the next book, a lazy attempt at tying 2D platformer movement to exposition dumps or might this just be another glaringly obvious symptom of how clunky this whole thing is designed?
idk maybe don't attempt to speer head "art games" if you already have a hard time with basic ass design.

i also have an irrational disdain for the greasy "painterly" sprite work. Looks like they used a gamer's armpit as a digital brush in photoshop CS3.

yea yea I am just a hater, just ignore my dumb, unhinged opinion. i really just needed to rant before uninstalling this thing.