March Analysis: The Swapper

          The Swapper is a puzzle game dealing with platforms, lights, and the eponymous device used to navigate the space station. This game stands out from puzzle platformers mainly due to its unique art style and mechanics. It quickly turns from being an interesting game with an eerie atmosphere into a horror story where you feel isolated from everything else alive in the station. 

          The game works like this: you control a device called The Swapper. It allows the user to create a clone of himself that acts dependently. Whenever you move, the clone moves in the same direction at the same pace. If you jump, the clone jumps. You can have up to four clones of yourself at one time, though some puzzles will force you to work with less. The Swapper can also fire a beam that lets you swap places with your clone, hence the name. Two simple mechanics that lead into one of the most complicated puzzle games I’ve played to date.

The art style astounds me. At first glance it appears to be 3D assets. But upon reading more about this game, it turns out the environment is made from clay! Every wall, floor, panel, plant, portal, and block is pure clay. Some parts are 3D modeled such as the player character, but it gives the world this alien appearance. It makes sense as the station you’re inhabiting is on an alien planet. Everything appears shaped by hand and warped into an unnatural precision. Lots of work went into making this game look as great as it does.

          Mechanics are introduced steadily to the player. First, you learn about how to create clones with The Swapper. When making a clone, time slows down and a red outline of yourself appears as your cursor. Letting go of the button spawns the clone into existence. Touching the clone with your own body absorbs it back into you. Walking under white spotlights also eliminates clones and serves as a quick way to reset a puzzle and try again. Next the player is taught the idea of swapping with their clones. Simply clicking the other button fires a white beam at the target and the player trades places with their clone. The process is instant, but there are some cases in which you may need to slow down time by preparing to generate a clone before you attempt a swap. One ill-timed shot can cost you your life, especially if you’re falling from hundreds of feet up. 

Once players do enough puzzles to get used to the idea of cloning and swapping, the lights make an appearance. Lights affect The Swapper by limiting its functions. Players cannot create clones in blue light, but they can still swap places with any existing clones. In red light, players can create clones, but not swap places. When the lights combine, they create a violet light which renders The Swapper useless. The puzzles involving light will require the player to either turn off certain lights with switches or by finding workarounds to the lights that stay on permanently.

          Gravity adds even more complexity to an already tricky game. When standing on a white glowing surface, players will swap gravity depending on which direction the surface is facing. If it’s facing up, gravity becomes directed from the ceiling. If the surface is pointing down, gravity is reversed back to the floor. Careful when falling as hitting the ground after leaping from a high place will kill you. In instances like these, you’ll need to create a clone of yourself, then swap to it and let your old self plummet to death.

          Four is a peculiar choice for how many clones are allowed to be used. In every puzzle, you will be using all of them to reach the solution. In some puzzles, the number of clones you can utilize is limited to two or three due to needing to have someone stand on switches to open doors to the puzzles themselves. The developers likely had a lot of ideas for puzzles that worked with just two clones or three, but ultimately went with four. It may have been the best choice for the biggest variety of puzzles, plus they knew they could place limitations on the player if they felt a solution could be reached too easily with all four clones available. Adding more clones to the player’s arsenal might have resulted in a much easier game, but the puzzles could end up being enormous and elaborate in order to warrant the use of all those extra clones. Four feels like the perfect number to work with.

          Throughout the game are terminals that have info on what happened to the space station. Scientists found some sentient rocks, studied them, then inadvertently got themselves killed. You and one other person are the only survivors. As you find more terminals, the game makes you question identity. What does it mean to be yourself? If you make a clone, are you still you? Or is the clone you? What are the implications of destroying your own clones after swapping? The game wants you to ask yourself this, but you can’t afford to get too attached to the idea of self-preservation. Many of the puzzles require that you sacrifice your clones in order to succeed. In the end, there can only be one you.

          This is a game that should be on a bucket list. It’s a prime example of using simple mechanics to design difficult puzzles, it never gets boring or repetitive, the atmosphere is truly unsettling, and the gameplay invokes thought. It doesn’t necessarily convey narrative through the puzzles themselves, but it’s story is told through interacting with the other survivor and the terminals as well as the Watchers. Good forms of art make you think about their message. The Swapper makes you think not only about problems and solutions, but about identity and what it means to be you.