{"id":344,"date":"2013-09-16T04:54:42","date_gmt":"2013-09-16T04:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/?p=344"},"modified":"2013-09-16T04:54:42","modified_gmt":"2013-09-16T04:54:42","slug":"the-swapper-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/16\/the-swapper-a-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The Swapper – A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. In this review I give some mechanical spoilers and a brief story overview without too many details.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0and 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<\/a>,\u00a0did 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Facepalm<\/a>\u00a0has 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":415,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions\/415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}