What is a “soul?” Can our personal senses of identity be explained by biochemistry alone, or is there something else that makes us … us?
The Swapper is a remarkable little puzzle-platformer by Helsinki-based Facepalm Games that bases itself on these questions. It was released on Steam May 30th after floating about the indie scene for a couple years and winning quite a few awards for its design, remarkable art, and stirring sound.
You begin as an astronaut landing on a seemingly-abandoned research station. Right away, The Swapper’s unique art style is front-and-center: each element of the game has been handcrafted out of clay and “everyday materials.” The dark ambiance is illuminated by baleful floodlights and your own flashlight, which often only give you just enough information about your surroundings to avoid tumbling into a deep abyss.
Shortly after getting acquainted with the controls (WASD + mouse, for the most part), you discover the “swapper device.” While it will inevitably draw comparisons to Portal’s titular piece of equipment, the swapper gun has its own dynamic: it can “project” up to four physical copies of yourself across the screen and then teleport your consciousness – your “being” – via line of sight into one of those copies.
The “swapper device,” which projects physical copies of your character around the screen, is the core of The Swapper’s puzzle design.
The clones you create of yourself mimic your every move, and this is the basis for the game’s often ingeniously-designed puzzles. Red light prevents you from sending your consciousness into copies, and copies can’t be made in blue light beams. Your goal is always to reach an “encryption orb” at the end of a room, and once collected, these can be used at certain terminals to open up new sections of the space station.
The puzzles, which frequently challenged me but never left me completely stumped, are solid enough to carry a game on their own, but where The Swapper really shines is in art direction. The space station reminded me of the salvage ship, Nostromo, in the original Alien film, and the ominous story of sentient rocks that unfolds via found memoranda, recordings, and the rocks – or “Watchers” – themselves is striking. The seemingly absent crew ran into some problems regarding research into the swapper device and wound up asking themselves troubling questions about the nature of being and consciousness.
The game’s mechanics themselves underscore these questions. Often to traverse a deep pit or other obstacle, you’ll have to project a copy of yourself to safety, then transfer your mind into that copy as your former self falls and crumbles pitifully far below. It’s hard not to feel guilty about being so cavalier about the flesh-and-blood vessel that was you until moments ago.
The keyboard/mouse control scheme feels very tight and responsive, and holding the right mouse button down to project a copy also puts the game in slow motion, which makes the puzzles more about thinking than about pulling off Super Meat Boy-esque skill jumps and shots.
Set in space, certain sections of The Swapper are zero-G.
Aristotle believed that the human brain is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, on which life experiences are written. But as experimental psychologist Steven Pinker recently observed, blank slates don’t do anything unless there’s something else there to notice and react to the patterns on them – something more than mere brain chemistry. The Swapper isn’t the kind of game that provides a pat answer to the question; instead, it’s content to provide a context for exploring it.
A couple words of warning, though. At launch, The Swapper had issues with some Intel HD graphics processors (often found in PC laptops). I’m running a notebook with a pretty recent i5 and an Nvidia graphics processor, and I had to manually select the Nvidia GPU before the game would run. There’s no workaround yet for Intel HD graphics if that’s all you have, but the developers have said they’re working on the issue. Also, it only took me about six hours to complete (as someone who does not generally play puzzle-platformers), and there’s not a whole lot of replay value. Still, at $14.99 it’s hardly a major investment – although it might be worth it to wait for an inevitable Steam Sale before purchasing.
Graphics compatibility issues and relative brevity aside, The Swapper is easy to heartily recommend. It’s beautiful, atmospheric, mysterious, and the core puzzle action is fairly original and solidly-designed — enough to provide that well-loved feeling of accomplishment upon solving. Combined with its complex subject matter, The Swapper is not only an enjoyable experience, but also a rather impressive piece of art.
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