Schein

This one is a pretty tedious mess. I was hoping for some cool brain twisters, but all the puzzles were barely puzzles at all and most of the gameplay seemed more about being as annoying as possible. The biggest problems is the light radius and a lack of information to the play as to what each layer contains. This means a lot of the issues you run into this game are due to making blind jumps and hoping you are in the correct space to not end up dead. The frustration is alleviated somewhat by a lovely soundtrack, but then you look at the pretty gross art and hear the obnoxious main character and it brings you right back into the distaste. There are dozens of puzzle platformer more worth playing, replaying, then replaying again over playing this.

Interesting at first, gets boring and frustrating really quickly
Half the mechanics make no sense
Plus you have to go through the credits an unnecessary amount of times
Also low fps at certain points for some reason

Do you recommend this game?
Ноу, ай абсолютли донт рекомендовать этот агли продукт. Ай мин, зыс ис вери скучная энд дисгастинг гэйм. Ай вонт май мани бэк.

2D-indie platformer, with an interesting storyline, and nice graphics.

Listen to this while you are exploring my profile! Hope you enjoy and don't forget to comment below!

Have a great day and remember to be stay safe!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjskFrJPD3o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gj47G2e1Jc

The 2nd phase of the first boss (thorny plants) was really annoying. and its really different from i've seen on walkthrough video.
there is this obstacle bar that blocking my spiky bar to drop onto the boss while on walkthrough there is no obstacle.
overall i enjoyed the game despite the differencies. 7/10

EDIT: nevermind. i finally defeated the thorny boss. the spiky bar can goes through the obstacle bar. dang devs they really got me for 15 minutes lol to figured it out.

Great indie game.

+ Simple storyline with few good twists.
+ Beautiful soundtrack.
+ Great platforming.
+ Great puzzles, there's actually quite a lot of puzzles in this game.
+ Greatly combines puzzles and platforming in one package.
+ Great voice acting.
+ Very unique and interesting graphics style, whole level design has 4 different dimensions or whatever you call them, even through each of them are mostly re-skins each looks great and a bit different, it feels very well done.
+ Collectables unlock some short text dialogues. They are challenging to get, very satisfying.

- Some weird performance. Game automatically starts lagging a bit after playing for half hour and lag keeps increasing the more you play. After 1h of playtime game lags unplayably. If I quit the game it runs very smoothly again and always starts lagging after I play a bit. It sucks I have to restart the game every 30 minutes. This issue has been mentioned by many players, yet there's no better fix other than keep restarting the game as far as I know.
- Final boss battle is cryptic and a really hard pain in the ass, it's really unfair 1. Cryptic, I had to play for half hour until figured out how to beat him 2. In his last form he starts shooting "invisible" projectiles, they look like water so they are almost invisible. 3. It's pretty much trial and error kind of battle, every step requires perfect play. Still, I must admit that it's great that it saves after every hit you make on that boss, otherwise I couldn't imagine myself ever beating it.


8/10

The core game mechanic of Schein is using colored light to make certain elements of the game world appear or disappear. You have your own guiding light, which can be turned on or off in three different colors. The guiding light can be left behind in any location and called back to you from afar. There are sometimes several additional colored lamps, which you can carry around, put in strategic places, and when lamps are destroyed they respawn (which is sometimes used as a game mechanic). There are platforms popping in and out of existence depending on the ambient light near them, sometimes platforms start to move in response to light sources close a switch point. Sometimes several light sources need to be put close together and it can matter in which order you put the lamps in their place. All this makes for some pretty complex puzzles. Some sections involve fast moving platforms and hazards which require a rapid succession of many well-timed button clicks – make one mistake and you have to start the sequence all over again. Fortunately, after completing nearly every puzzle there is a checkpoint.

I enjoyed playing Schein very much, it is a nicely balanced package of puzzles solving and platforming. It reminded me of the game Hue. The final boss fight, however, was not so nice – it took me over an hour to figure out how to fight it, which is far from obvious. Not gonna spoil anything here, but as soon as you have figured it out, it is not so difficult to beat.

The graphics are cute and cartoon-like, but the game world is perhaps a bit too crisp and clear – I think it would have looked better if the unlit parts of the game world were a bit darker and misty. The story is about a father looking for his lost some in a swamp – but the story does not add much depth to the game. The atmospheric soundtrack is actually pretty good, but the voice acting is less so (especially the annoying grunts when dying). You can listen to the OST on bandcamp for free: https://leedaudio.bandcamp.com/releases

If your high school German has become a little rusty, you won’t understand some of the terminology used in the game.

I really wanted to like Schein, but the excellent concept for this platformer was unfortunately overwhelmed by desperately poor voice acting, long and tedious platforming sequences with finicky tuning, and slow pacing overall.

There is a ton of creativity in this game, and a lot of the artwork is stunning, but it just feels cumbersome (not fun) to grind my way from save point to save point. Precision timing is required to succeed, but not in a fun way.

I don't regret picking this game up on sale for $1.34 to try it, but the repetitive and unpolished gameplay mean that I can't recommend Schein. I should note that there is a free demo available for this game - I'd recommend trying the controls out before you spend your money.

Schein, while visually remotely resembling a blurry version of Braid, falls completely behind mechanically as a puzzle platforming game.

It plays like Super Meat Boy without speed. You will keep dying and dying until you have memorized the outlay of all traps and will have to battle with the extremely limited jumping height and distance of the character model more often than actually having to find out what to do. Additionally the visible area of the different lights - the main mechanic of the game - is infuriatingly narrow, meaning that even with the already slow movement of the player model, you'll be required to take things even more slowly.

This was an absolutely tedious and bothersome completion for me. Can't recommend, not to puzzle platforming enthusiasts and especially not to anyone else.

I must admit that about halfway through the game I was already out of patience and ready to say bad things about this game and hoping it would end soon. Schein has some good ideas, the lights mechanic, some puzzles are really challenging, the battle against the last boss has a very interesting dynamics and the system to go back through the areas of the map to solve the puzzles. But everything in it, for some reason, became repetitive and tiring in such a fast way that it made the game lose its fun. In the end, when I killed the last boss, I was relieved, because I was finally going to stop playing this game. What I believe has happened is that the people who did Schein had good ideas, plenty of motivation and a lot of creativity, but what they lacked was financial resources to be able to create a better game.

A charming and entertaining game.

[table]
[tr]
[td]Title[/td]
[td]Schein[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Developer[/td]
[td]Zeppelin Studio[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Publisher[/td]
[td]Meridian4[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Release[/td]
[td]10 October 2014[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Graphics[/td]
[td]2D[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Genre[/td]
[td]Platform[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Price[/td]
[td]€6,99[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Rating[/td]
[td]7.5/10[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

The game.

Gameplay.

Positive points. (+)

• Decent story.
  
• Awesome art style.
  
• Relaxing music.
  
• Brilliant game mechanics.
  
• Good level design.
  
• Progressive difficulty on levels (except one or two parts, but it's ok).
  
• Puzzles are never repeated.
  

Negative points. (-)

[*]None. Some parts are too hard, implies a lot of deaths, but isn't a con. It's challenging.

I can't recommend this game. Sadly!

It looks great. I like the stile of the game. I also like the idea behind it.
And I love platformers.

But this game just have no flow. It plays very unintuitive, because the controlls reacts... strange... can't describe it.
It also feels as the game was made for a smaller player character. You often die because ONE of your polygons hits a spike.... or another platforme... and so you fall into the swamp.

The difficulty is not very high actually. You jump over platforms, try to avoid spikes and the water and use the light to see other paths and dangerous things. That could be really fun, but it gets boring very very fast.
And then it gets frstrating... cause your character seems to be too big and cause you often don't know what to do and where to jump. (I hate blind jumps -.-)

tldr;

pro:
- the visuals are very nice and detailed
- the idea with the light orb that lets you see another world is great

neutral:
- the voice acting is not my taste
- the music isn't remarkable in any way

con:
- the controlls are somewhat.. "clumsy"
- the gameplay has no flow
- the dificult isn`t hard but often just unfair

Don't pay more than 2€ for this game. So buy it in a sale if you whish to...
But if you really want to enjoy a platformer or a jump n run, there are many others, which will bring you way more fun. ;)

What could have been a lovely clever platformer was, unfortunatelly, turned into a series of long, inexplicably tedious jumping sequences that is all about split-second timing.

If you are a hardcore platformers fan, though, you may want to get this one while the discount lasts ;)
By the way, Schein includes trading cards, although (as of writing this review) it doesn't say so on the Store Page.

This game is addictive. Especially for puzzle/platformer lovers. I really enjoyed the challenges this game offers. The thing I liked the most about this game is sometimes you have to be precise about timing when you are solving the puzzles.

Pros:
- Brilliant game mechanics
- Good level design
- Progressive difficulty on levels (except one or two parts, but it's no such a big deal)
- Puzzles never repeat

Cons:
- Game ending, story-wise and gameplay-wise, is not original (Reminded me so much of another game that I cannot mention here)

Charming little puzzler that does a lot of things right, but some wrong. In general the idea is that you manipulate light around you to reveal and mix different worlds so you can overcome obstacles. The concept works great and allows for some difficult brain twisters. The puzzles are challanging but also rewarding once you get past them.

Graphics are decent, nothing impressive to me, in fact if anything I would say the game feels bit unpolished there but given its an indie game I'm not taking that as a con. It didn't bother me. Couple of things that did bother me though:
- Unless you shed the appropriate light color you won't know whats there. This may not seem like a problem at first, but there will be many sequences where you have to navigate tight spaces switching lights and you will die many times because you switched the light too soon or too late and there is no way for you to know until you try (and die). Game that does this much better as an example is Fly'n where you have shadows of the other world.
- The game tries to do a decent job at introducing you to different things you can do, but doesn't hold your hand. This means if you are particularly resourceful you may overcome some obstacles in a non intended way and never learn what new mechanics you were supposed to pick up until you get stuck much later, because you never learned it. Other things you never tried or had to try until you are stuck 30min on the same puzzle and discover "Hey! This is possible?! That would have saved me hours had I just known!"

The story is non fairly shallow, not going to say more about it. Overall it was a nice journey and I would still recommend just be prepared for some (good) frustration. 7.5/10

Schein is a fun little platforming game. It reminds me of LIMBO with the dark gloomy shading. The difference is you have lights which, depending if they're on or not, show you different platforms and methods to get through the puzzles. They brighten the world and show how beautiful it really is through all the gloom.

"Schein" is a very good looking game with intense music and a beautiful and interesting landscape. Also the character is very good and you are very fast in the right mood for a good game with an interesting story.

BUT!!!

This game is just frustating... It is not possible to beat this game without a few hundred, or maybe thousand times dying. I beat the game to 50% and my deathcounter score is 452. There is no chance to make most of the the jumping passages in one run, without falling and dying. You have to die many times in one jumping passage, even to know, what you have to do next. This is just bullshit and there are other ways to make a game interesting or difficult. This game is not very difficult, it is just unfair. And it lags many times, so that it is impossible to time your jumps or lights changes right. And then... of course - you die. This is what this game is all about. Just to frustate you with unfair and impossible to make it in one run, jumping passages. Maybe this game could be good, but the producers just had no idea how to make a game difficult without being this shit like "Schein".
So don't buy this piece of shit.
I don't know how this game could get any award. Maybe no other game was nominated.
Really!!! Hands off. This game is one of the badest games I've ever played. And I've played many bad games.

First of, I need to mention the pros about this game:
- very nice design (the first thing that captured me about it)
- the game mechanics are built upon a good idea I guess
- the story is so-so. The protagonist is trying to find his son with the help of a fairy like being that generally converses with him on the way through a magical swamp. Other than that, it's not too clear what's happening.

Now, the cons:
- Though based upon a good idea, the game mechanics are not enjoyable.
- The game mostly consists of jumping and platforming puzzles utilizing the special fairy lights gained during the story (green, red, blue) and they main problem is that they get annoying fast, so much so that the frustration ruined the whole game for me within an hour of playtime.
- In addition the moving and jumping mechanics are clunky. It's like the guy is moving in a suit full of lead.
- The check points are not exactly placed in accordance with the difficulty of the areas (I would consider the game's difficulty to be hard in general).

Conclusively, if you don't like hard and frustrating platforming puzzles I don't recommend buying this game. If you do...I'd rather suggest "Super Meat Boy": :D

Schein is a neat puzzle platformer game focusing on using various light sources to warp reality to solve the puzzles in the game. I liked the fact that some of the puzzles are thinking based while others are reflex based. The game does not completely bogs itself down with a single type of puzzle over and over again; it alternates between these two types of puzzles to keep you interested to the game. You never feel any unnecessary repetion in the game. It has quite a good of an atmosphere. The graphics and music is nothing like Bastion, Braid but it is decent enough and fits very well with the atmosphere.

There is also the underlying story which unravels as the game progresses. When everything is finished it just felt a bit underwhelming to me. For such an interesting and compelling atmosphere, I would have preferred at least multiple endings. But then again it is not much of a problem.

I really recommend Schein for anybody who is interested in a good puzzle platformer game. Also considering its price, it is a very good deal for a low price.

UPDATE: Sorry, people, but I have to change my review. After spending several hours with it, I've decided the level design is too cumbersome and technical to merit a thumbs-up.

I want to recommend this game; the graphics are amazing and the triplicate-art shows a level of devotion and attention to detail that most games don't have. Unfortunately, the puzzles eventually get very minute and annoying -- so much so that the game is no longer fun. I simply quit caring and stopped playing. Maybe other people enjoy this sort of pixel-different placement challenge, but I don't want that sort of stress and frustration in my games.

I struggled through many levels that I didn't enjoy, because I assumed the fun factor would return, but it never did. It's just not worth my time anymore.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Original Review: A remarkable little platformer.

Combine the focused visual concentration of Limbo -- the refined art style, the elegant control mechanisms unencumbered by needless complications -- with the unforgiving, punishing precision of Super Meat Boy -- the tiny ledges, the insane death spikes waiting below -- and you've got a superb title.

You could wait until it gets cheaper, but I can tell this will be worth every penny of the $9.00 I paid.