‘What if there is no soul to swap?”
The Swapper is a 2D side-scrolling puzzle game set in space. What’s not to love?
I had never heard of this game beforehand, making it perfect for what I was looking for in these posts. I want to jump into games I know nothing about and just experience something new, and write about it. Booting the game up, I still didn’t even know the genre, but could see it was futuristic and probably space-based.
It soon becomes clear this is a puzzle game after obtaining the eponymous tool called the Swapper. Very little to no explanation is made as to who you are, what this tool is here for and why we are moving through these areas. This sense of enigma carries throughout the game, and even after finishing not everything is exactly explained, intentionally I assume. Straightaway comparisons with now-classic 2D puzzlers like Limbo and Braid are made, with the faceless, floaty protagonist reminiscent of the former and the physics-manipulating methods of the latter.
After your spaceship lands on a nondescript space station, you quickly realise things haven’t been hunky-dory here for some time, as the whole place seems abandoned. Things very slowly piece together, with the majority of the game, perhaps the first 75%, spent completing puzzles without any real kind of knowledge as to why. However I found the ‘levels’ (for want of a better word) to be interesting, diverse and challenging enough to want to continue and find out what the hell was going on.
Clues to the narrative come mainly in the form of rocks set against the backdrop, activated simply by walking past them. Known mysteriously as ‘Watchers’ in the menu, they offer extremely odd sentences that represent someone’s thoughts. In other words, these rocks are ‘alive’. On top of this we gradually hear more of a woman’s voice, seemingly talking to the player and offering slithers of advice, and computer terminals acting as a diary of sorts from previous inhabitants. As the story progresses these all tie-in (somewhat) as you’d expect, whether its in a satisfying way or not is up for debate.
To the core of the game though, and where you will spend 90% of your time with the Swapper: solving puzzles. Each set in its own ‘room’, with the goal to collect the orb within, which is always so close yet of course, so far. The Swapper tool (or gadget/weapon, whatever it is) is used for creating and swapping between clones. The actions available to the player are move, jump, create clone, swap between clone, and that’s it. A maximum of 4 clones can be produced, but each one’s movements replicate each other and the player, causing much frustration. Trial and error was certainly my method to begin with, but with more experience came a deeper understanding, and the difficulty curve reflected that well. Different coloured lights restrict you from making/swapping clones, and later on a gravity-swapping feature is introduced to confuse you even more.
Each area requires thought, not skill to complete. If you ever find yourself having to carefully time your movements, or rush to make the perfect shot, you’re doing it wrong. Some rooms may take you a couple of minutes, some may take several more (I managed to listen to an hour-long podcast whilst infuriatingly figuring out one room). A ‘simple-once-you-know-how’ solution is required each time, but the horrible desire to find a walkthrough guide is always scratching away.
The rooms are broken up with ever-increasing story elements, a few spacewalks and inventive ways of traversing the somewhat large and confusing map (which thankfully becomes manageable with the use of ‘fast travel’). The story is hard to invest in if you don’t take the time to focus on it, with a lot of text explaining the back-story and forecasting what will happen, however discovering what the rock messages mean, why no one else is here, and what the Swapper actually is becomes interesting in itself, however the final hour or so could leave you a little unfulfilled. Attempting to make the player think about the ‘deeper’ message is apparent, and as crazy as it sounds, the rocks help you do that.
An accomplished puzzler that doesn’t overstay its welcome, works the brain in a way I haven’t seen before and tells a very lonely story well enough. Is it up there with kings of the genre? Probably not, but having a tough act to follow is unfair on such a well-crafted game from such a small team.
The Swapper is available on PC, PS3 PS4 and Vita. Reviewed on PC.
Random Steaming 