Schim is like Homeward Bound, but you’re a shadow

polygon.com:

Your shadow is one of the very few things that stays with you throughout your entire life. You may only notice it in harsh light, or when it makes funny shapes, but it’s always there. So what happens when it becomes unmoored from you? This is the idea that developers Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman take on in Schim, a study of light and shadow.

The game begins with a child whose shadow can hop around and explore on its own, but which never goes too far from its person. It follows that person through their lifetime — playtime in the park, heartbreak, college graduation — all of which plays out through dialogue, with the player controlling the shadow to get the person from place to place. The shadow hops alongside its person until one really bad day: The person gets fired from their job, then trips and falls on their way home. The fall shakes the shadow loose, and after this point, the person goes on without it. The rest of Schim is the shadow desperately making its way back to its person, always slightly behind them as their life continues to change — both shadow and person picking up the pieces.

Mechanically, Schim is a 3D platforming game in which the shadow — who is frog-shaped when unattached from their person — hops between other shadows in the world around them. You can do big jumps and little jumps, perfectly timing them to ensure you’re in the right place at the right time. If you miss the shadow you’re jumping towards, you’ll get sent back to an earlier shadow; usually, it’s not too far, but moving shadows don’t count, so if you mess up, you could get sent back pretty far. Schim’s platforming and movement puzzles are relatively simple, but I’ve often found myself impressed with how clever the challenges are. In one level, the shadow has to manipulate traffic lights — turning them on and off — to get the car’s shadows in the correct places to reach a certain area. In another, Schim plays like a reverse Frogger as the shadow hops from box to box on a