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 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.

"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)

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.

Being on a strange alien planet, you are tasked with the mission of using a device called The Swapper to escape, you must free yourself from this foreign alien race. The problem is, these aliens aren’t alive, they are a gathered mass conscious. The space station you are on is home to research and experimentation on these beings as well as The Swapper. As the story goes on you find out who’s responsible for The Swapper and why everyone died. The game has an eerie atmosphere with mind-bending puzzles.

The main mechanic of this device is being able to clone yourself. You can make up to four copies, and these are used to solve intriguing puzzles. Holding down the right mouse button will show a red outline of your clone so you know where you’re going to place it. The left mouse button lets you transport your soul into that clone allowing you to control it. It’s not always as easy as that. Colored lights play a big role in the game. Blue allows you to teleport but you can’t place clones, red is the opposite. Purple doesn’t allow you to do either. Sometimes lights are blocking buttons, paths, and most importantly the orbs you need to collect to make it through the space station. There are 124 orbs in the whole game and about 30 puzzles. Each puzzle is completely different, but later in the game, one other major element gets introduced.

That element is gravity, and with it being introduced so late in the game, it actually extends the longevity of the game. Instead of getting bored early on, you have to now use gravity which makes the puzzles that much harder. Walking upside down to place an upside down clone on a button, only to teleport to it, place another clone, then find out how to get yourself right side up without dropping all the clones. The tricky thing is that all the clones will follow you. Movement plays a big puzzle solving role as well. The Swapper is a very innovative game and one of the most original since Portal.

The story elements are told through some voice work, but it’s only from one woman. She follows you throughout the ship and later tells you how to get out. The rest is told through logs that you find throughout your journey. The atmosphere is very eerie with dark visuals and the feeling of being alone and scared. The only issues lie in the fact that some puzzles are just way too hard to figure out. They are very unbalanced ranging from really easy to suddenly super hard. I had to use a video walkthrough to solve some of them, and they were so complicated, I never would have figured them out on my own. That’s the biggest problem with all puzzle games, you have to have balance. There are some puzzles where the solution is right in front of your face, but others not so much.

There’s also very little replay value, you need to complete all the puzzles to finish the game, and there’s no time trials or anything like that. Once you finish it you’re pretty much done and will never come back. The story is also a bit flat towards the end, you never really find out what these aliens are and what they want. What’s here is fun and very original, but it needs a bit more to stand up to puzzle games like Portal.