Game Information

The Swapper

Platform: PS3, PS4, Vita

Developer: Facepalm Games/Curve Studios

Publisher: Curve Digital

MSRP: $19.99

Released: August 5th, 2014

The most base description of The Swapper is that it’s a puzzle platformer. However, such a simplistic summary does a tremendous disservice to not only the game’s design, but to an artfully-told story that are best delivered with these mechanics in place.

You’ve likely seen setups like this across all kinds of science fiction — you’re stuck on a derelict space station, and you need to find a way off; again, pretty standard stuff. But as I’ve already said, there’s much more to The Swapper.

Pushing blocks and stepping on switches is common in puzzle platformers, but the game’s true ingenuity is in the titular swapper device. It allows up to four clones of yourself to exist at a time — five bodies in all — and they all jump and move in sync as you do in perfect sync. You can swap your consciousness into any of the clones in your line of sight to take over as the “real” you, and walking into clones erases them from existence.

There are also colored lights that shine on certain parts of later puzzles to make them harder to solve. You can’t create a clone in blue light, and red lights cut off the swapper ray. Purple lights do both of those things at once. Strangely, the solutions are usually fairly obvious — it’s often a matter of putting a clone “there, there, and there” as you lead your conscious body to collect an orb at the end of the puzzle — but figuring out the necessary choreography to do so can be fiendish.

If that’s all you care to know and just want to zip along solving puzzles along the way, The Swapper offers a satisfying, if brisk, way to exercise your gray matter. Yet I’d wager that it’s impossible not to think about the game’s subtext; immediately after acquiring the device and throughout the entire game, countless clones are created and disposed on a whim, often lying in broken heaps after falling from mammoth heights due to precarious positioning and careless movement as you make yet another attempt to reach a shiny ball at the end of a room.

Besides raising questions about what constitutes the self, The Swapper also offers commentary about ethics in scientific discovery. There are certainly plenty of ethical questions to be raised just by the simple act of cloning and disposing of bodies as you deem necessary, but there’s more. The technology behind the device comes from a race of what are best described as telepathic rocks called Watchers. Because they don’t seem to have senses to perceive the world the way we do or a way to outwardly voice their displeasure, the scientists on the station feel entitled to take and study as they please.

It’s all very unsettling, but every bit of it is worth considering. The Swapper isn’t remotely scary but it’s certainly creepy, and it’s matched perfectly by its brilliant visual style. Every part of the space station and every character was modeled from clay or other basic items and then later digitized into the game. It makes for a very tangible world, because at some point it actually was, and the overall rough look sells the game’s dreadful tone to a tee.

Although The Swapper doesn’t seem like a graphically intensive game, there are a couple of technical differences between versions of the game that are worth noting. On PlayStation 4, you get to see it hit the 1080p/60 frames per second that have now become the gold gaming standard, and it looks every bit as good if not better than last year’s PC release. The PS3 and Vita versions see the framerate halved, and the textures and intensive lighting are toned down a bit as well. In any case, $19.99 gets you all three versions of the game, and cloud saving lets you pick up wherever you may have left off on another device.

The Swapper is an achievement. It’s hard enough to think of a compelling puzzle mechanic to build an entire game around, but to think that it also includes a story as pensive as this is astonishing. Buy it.