Zeppelin Studio was kind enough to provide us with a review key for SCHEIN, and you can read below our first impressions of it. As always, we’ve also included a video playthrough showing the first 10 minutes of the game.
SCHEIN is a described as a challenging puzzle platformer that tells the story of a desperate man, who ventures forth into the mystical swamp in search of his missing son.
The basic idea behind SCHEIN is to complete the stages by using different elements of lights (each one of them reveals different platforms and obstacles). Think of these lights as alternative realities or parallel worlds that are structured differently from the default one. Which basically reminds us of Stonerid; another indie 2D platformer in which you could also solve puzzles by altering reality.
SCHEIN relies heavily on trial and error, meaning that you’re bound to make mistakes and die as you try to find out how puzzles can be solved. Not only that, but the game packs some platforming elements (jumping around and avoiding dangerous obstacles while switching between realities) that will easily frustrate you. To make things worse, the visibility of the alternative world (the radius of the alternative reality that surrounds players when a light is being selected) is very limited, resulting in many mistakes that could have been easily avoided otherwise.
Unfortunately, SCHEIN felt like a casual indie game. Its visuals did no impress us, its music while good is nothing memorable, its environments were kind of bland, and we’ve already seen games (Stonerid and Concursion) that use alternative realities as a means of solving puzzles.
SCHEIN is currently priced at $8.99 and can be purchased from here. The good news is that a demo to try before buying. So give it a shot because you may find it quite interesting, especially if you are fans of this genre.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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