A friend gifted this wonderful indie game to me saying, “It’s a 2D platforming puzzle game with incredible visuals (it’s all claymation!) and an eerie story.” That sums up the game perfectly in one sentence. If you like Portal, you’ll probably like Swapper. In this review I give some mechanical spoilers and a brief story overview without too many details.
The Swapper does a great job taking a single mechanic and making a really solid game around it. The game gives you a gun that allows you to create up to 4 extra bodies that all move in unison and swap which body is your active body. Like Portal, this is all the game needs to create a full experience with some challenging puzzles. Another way to look at this is that the developers, Facepalm, did an incredible job with their level design. The environments perfectly compliment the swapper gun mechanic, nothing feels contrived. I was especially impressed with the subtle use of pits to limit the number of clones you have available for a given puzzle.
I found myself getting stuck at various points and coming back a day later only to solve the puzzle almost instantly. This may be a sign that some of the puzzle solving tricks were not introduced as smoothly as they could have been. I found myself getting a bit too used to solving puzzles in one way and needed that time away to open up my mind to a new technique. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since I did keep coming back to figure out how to solve the next puzzle. However, taking a break from the game ruins the “a-ha” moments a bit, so I only had one really satisfying one of these in my play through.
The story is mostly told through a series of logs that you find throughout the ship, but they never give a full picture of what is going on. There is one voiced character, but I typically found her more confusing than anything else and never quite knew why I was following her instructions, especially given what I was reading in the logs. The art does a great job of complimenting the story and the developers may have intended all of this confusion, so I can’t say that these critiques are necessarily ‘bad.’ I did get the impression that the game was trying to explore some existential and psychological ideas but never really go to the point. Maybe I’m too dense.
The challenging puzzles definitely got the brain juices flowing to the point that I would recommend playing this game. I’m really impressed with developers who find one solid mechanic that they can make an entire game around, and Facepalm has really delivered on this. The Swapper gun is perfect for this purpose: generalized enough to allow for a lot of puzzle building but specific enough to be interesting.
