Similar to Unmechanical I played recently, The Swapper is a game I've had since near the start of the PS4 era yet never got around to playing until 10 years later. Equally like Unmechanical this game is also a sci-fi puzzle game but I feel overall though this is a much tighter and more interesting experience.

The Swapper uses cloning as a way of providing plenty of puzzles as well as a background for it's narrative of something weird and sinister happening at a deep space mining outpost known as Theseus. Your unnamed character finds a gun that allows them to create multiple clones of themself that copies their movements. This gun also allows your character to swap consciousness into the clones leaving your original body behind. There is some simple philosophy raised as the game progresses about what constitutes a mind and the morality of using the swapper though it's all surface level questions raised as you progress chasing after another astronaut that is talking to you and themselves at the same time.

The game is essentially a series of puzzle rooms off of a fairly linear path to collect orbs that allow you to open doors to progress. Rinse and repeat. It feels a little Metroidvania in the absolute barest sense that there is a map with locked doors. The puzzles are simple in a way I appreciate in that they are all fairly logical. Making clones at distances, swapping between them to hit switches etc. There are a few additional mechanics involving coloured lights limiting where you can create or swap clones as well as some artificial gravity to both mix things up and make the puzzles a bit harder. Most were fairly straight forward but a couple did stump me for a while until I realized the solution was much simpler than I thought, I just wasn't thinking laterally enough. The Swapper isn't perfect, some of the puzzles even when you have figured out what you need to do can be messed up by one poor placement forcing you to start the whole process over again can be a little frustrating at times but this is a minor complaint for other wise fairly consistently balanced puzzle design.

As good as the mechanics are the aesthetics of a game help bring it all together thematically and this game has a fantastic atmosphere, like a mixture of Aliens and The Abyss. The design, use of lighting and music create a great feeling of loneliness and fear despite it being a puzzle title that the thought of being isolated in space or under the sea can produce. What is more impressive is this was made entirely by two university students, as per Wikipedia:

"The Swapper was a project made by two University of Helsinki students Otto Hantula and Olli Harjola in their spare time. The Swapper was backed by the Indie Fund, the 6th indie game title the fund has supported. Rather than digital textures, the game features handcrafted art assets and clay which forms the various game levels."

I didn't notice it at the time playing but it actually makes a lot of sense for the visual style here.

The Swapper is only a few hours long, I finished it in a day which is either going to be a positive or negative for you but personally I puzzle games should be short and sweet so they don't out live their welcome. If you've got a spare afternoon or weekend you could do far worse than this atmospheric narrative based puzzle game.

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Sumptuous, mysterious, hyperstylized audiovisual descent (or more appropriately, ascent) into existentialism by way of snappy and deeply creative puzzles. Right alongside Escape Plan and Thomas Was Alone as one of the best high-caloric flash games on console you're likely to ever find. Its story is so much more than just background flavor text as I would have expected, touching on experimental themes of humanity and the inherent destruction individualism has on the mind. Gorgeous colors mixed with plenty of crunchy deaths and truly chilling body horror, with the meat of the game serving as a sublimely satisfying test of problem-solving the likes of which I've rarely ever seen in a video game before or since. Simple yet so, so rewarding. It's a brief one and the collectibles are meh, but it's still an unforgettable experience. Tremendous stuff, as eerie as it is relaxing.

A decent little game which still stands up a decade later. And I do mean 'little', because it didn't half feel short...

The core mechanic of the game is great, and its fun to be forced to learn the various ways you can abuse it to solve some of the later puzzles. But I'm less sold on the world outside of those puzzles.

The theming is very atmospheric and philosophical, but I fear that the game's short length means these end up being quite underdeveloped. It's quite possible there was more information in the secret rooms (that the game never let me know existed so I never looked for), but from my experience it feels like the game sets up lots of themes and mysteries that either get unceremoniously wrapped up quickly at the end, or dropped completely. Overall the theme the game is going for normally resonates pretty well with me, but I just found this one didn't quite land as well as it should have,

I have mixed feelings on the art style too. Technically its awesome that the game is animated in claymation but, perhaps to compensate for this, its also very dark and gritty with various ugly filters over the screen at times. I feel like the art style doesn't really fit the game so well and leaves it feeling disjointed, backed up by the fact all the puzzles are in self-contained side-rooms rather than incorporated into the game world at all.

Despite all this the game is honestly still pretty solid. The puzzles adequately explore pretty much everything the devs could have done with the concept, and I did come away feeling satisfied.

I wish this had just been a novel. Tom Jubert does an outstanding job here, using really interesting sci-fi concepts to explore themes of identity and consciousness. The characters are pretty weak, so I wasn't very emotionally invested like I was with the work he'd go on to do with The Talos Principle, but it's engaging and thought provoking nonetheless. Problem is, every time I get invested in this world and its story, a lackluster puzzle game gets in the way.

The puzzles aren't contextualized within the world or story at all, instead depending on your suspension of disbelief. No problem there. As long as the puzzles themselves wouldn't have any major impact on the plot, so that I could feel as though the game and I shared a mutual, unspoken understanding that they weren't actually a part of the story of the game, my suspension of disbelief could more than abide them. But without spoiling anything, at a certain point, a major story moment occurs specifically due to the events of a puzzle you have to complete. Not like the puzzle triggered something to happen in the world, I mean the specific thing you had to do to solve it leaves you in the state in which you need to be for this story moment to occur. A puzzle which, as is the case with all of the others in the game, has no reason whatsoever to exist in the context of the story. So a major event in the story is caused by a thing that the game has been asking you to pretend isn't happening up until that point. It's a shame too, because the moment in question is actually really great, and it's tainted by the feeling that the devs and writer cheated to make it happen.

There's that, and the fact that the puzzles themselves aren't great. They're not bad, some of them I found kinda fun, but outside of the game's core mechanic of creating clones of yourself and swapping your consciousness between them, there aren't any fun mechanics on display. There are boxes to move around, buttons to stand on, colored lights which inhibit your ability to clone or swap or both, and sections of floor which reverse gravity. Some puzzles were better than others, but nearly all of them felt the exact same. That said, it's a short game, so the saminess of them didn't have enough time to start feeling terribly monotonous. Just enough so that every time I had to do one, it felt like an interruption of what I was actually trying to experience.

I really wish this had just been a novel or a walking sim or something. The story is awesome, and I wish I'd just been able to focus on that instead of getting morsels of story in between mostly un-engaging puzzles. It's not a bad game by any stretch, and I would recommend it. It just feels like a big waste of potential.

The Swapper is a game where you solve puzzles by existing in multiple places at the same time.. sort of. It's got a strong visual design (that overcomes my usual aversion to detailed 3D looking assets in entirely 2D games) with a dark atmospheric spaceship to explore, and strong mysterious vibes in its story, mechanics and level design.

The puzzles themselves are more dynamic than I expected, introducing elements of timing and "skilled" platforming in a way that opens up the possibility space in an interesting way without being too mechanically demanding.

Having said that, I haven't been blown away by any puzzles throughout the first half or so of the game - and haven't experienced as power a moment of revelation as I would have liked from a game with such a compelling mechanical foundation.

I still haven't finished The Swapper yet, but I'm enjoying what I've played so far.

The Swapper punches above its weight. It's just long enough to fill up an afternoon if you want to play it all in a single sitting, but it still has the courtesy to actually end once it runs out of new puzzle ideas or story beats. The clay models and diorama-style environments are really unique and add a wonderful 50s sci-fi atmosphere to the whole game too. And the cloning/body jumping puzzles are all well made too, even if some of the optional ones are a bit too challenging given how much experience a player realistically has with the mechanics in such a short game.

The biggest knock against it I have is that I basically forgot it existed until now, so it just didn't quite stick in my head as much as I would hope.

What an evocative game, full of sublime moments of quiet and reflection, with a fascinating conceit – the creation of clones and the transfer of agency between them. Among recent titles that explore controlling multiple avatars at once (Mario 3D World, Badlands, Brothers), this is one of the most thoughtful and resonant. Losing yourself amidst your own clones is an existential crisis and a delight.

What a shame, then, that The Swapper is also just a collection of nonsensical puzzle rooms. Stop everything, stare at the screen, and forget once again that it’s movement that makes our onscreen selves come alive.

First, the puzzles are brilliant, with the ability to swap between four clones of yourself making a very intriguing and versatile game mechanic, with new ways to use your clones with every puzzle. The music and sound design is some of the best I have ever seen in a puzzle game and the visual style and presentation were spot on. The story is EXTREMELY thought-provoking, and while it takes a while to actually get a semblance of what the hell is going on, it is a great use of storytelling and I suggest getting all of the data logs to supplement that. I also suggest playing with subtitles, as the only gripe I have with this game would be the sometimes muddled voices, hidden under the background ambience and music, as well as radio-ish effects. Overall, The Swapper is an amazing puzzle game that took me about 6 hours, all of which were mind-bending, intelligent, and really well-done.

"Puzzles, Puzzles...And More Puzzles?"

"The Swapper" is a game I sort of remember playing about nearly a decade ago through PS Plus, and I don't remember liking it too much. It was a pretty difficult puzzler at times but had some solid ideas and progression of difficulty. However, the story was pretty nonsense and more style than anything else, yet the style was pretty dry and repetitive. It resulted in a gameplay loop that was held back by the game's length, repetition, and lack of solid elements surrounding it (story, worldbuilding, presentation).

The puzzles here are presented in a lackluster way at first but trust me when I say that they get really involved and complex over the campaign's runtime. It revolves around creating copies of yourself and swapping places with them to progress. All copies move when the main one moves, but it's in their respective space. Things get really tricky when you interact with red and blue lights as they prevent you from placing copies and swapping to them respectively. It's a solid system that only feels a bit too difficult occasionally and slightly overstays its welcome.

However, the story really disappoints here. It's mostly abstract conversations about life, existence, purpose, and other long-drawn-out concepts that never really get too deep with the game's context. There is only a handful of characters including your nameless, faceless character themselves, so you don't really get to become involved in the world very much at all either.

The presentation is just fine, but it kind of drops the ball with what could've been a creepier and more tense atmosphere. The darkness of the ship you traverse mixed with the lanky movement of characters felt off-putting, but when I realized that there was no danger, I stopped caring about the aesthetics altogether. This game could've used some scarier aesthetics or even possibly some action here and there, since all you really do is go around a big empty ship doing puzzles without seeing very much at all. The plot is surely empty enough, so it already feels like a poor choice not to have added more meat to the experience.

Overall, this is just a passable indie title at its best moments and a forgettable experience at its worst. It doesn't capitalize on its story/presentation at all, and instead tries to squeeze by with a nonetheless solid gameplay system. However, when comparing it to a game like the first "Portal", it's more difficult yet more boring because of a lack of care towards the narrative and worldbuilding. Thus, this one feels like a glorified puzzle tech demo that I would unfortunately Not Recommend.

Final Verdict: 5/10 (Average)