The Swapper is a solemn little puzzle-platformer that questions the concept of identity and the existence of the soul. It's also part of the free game lineup for Playstation Plus subscribers this month. While I can recommend The Swapper, I can't speak positively over some of its design choices, pacing, and overall length. I think it comes as a fitting inclusion in January's free game haul and it's worth playing, but I really wish I had waited for the opportunity to play it for free.
Similar to Portal, The Swapper challenges players with a series of rooms that involve an assessment of the layout and then an execution of the correct series of actions in order to solve it. Instead of a portal gun the player has access to a device that can clone the player up to four times. Each of these identical copies can only mimic the actions of one, in which the player is capable of swapping to each clone to enable positional advantages. The player is limited by obstacles (either walls or different hues of light) that may obstruct the device from cloning, swapping, or both. Overall the levels are clever but a large majority of the puzzles are simple and may take only moments to solve.
There are some glaring design choices that surround the centerpiece of the game. While a game like Portal rewards you by allowing you to advance to the next puzzle immediately, The Swapper scatters these puzzles around a space station that you explore freely. Your reward for completing a puzzle is instead a collectible power cell that allows you to advance to new sections of the station and progress through the story. Backtracking and exploring the station outside of the puzzles is dull. It's a slog to the next challenge and never really comes together in a meaningful way. I would have much rather preferred a game that provided denser content, or at least a world that required as much critical thinking as its puzzles to traverse. Instead the swapper device is delegated to an elementary function to get around and it just feels cheap and artificially lengthened to make up for the lack of true substance. What's more disappointing is that the puzzles actually ramp in difficulty but the game is so short that by the time the puzzles become most interesting the game is near completion.
In the end I found The Swapper to be a casual experience that could've been more. I think that it's a game worth playing but not one that left me satisfied. It certainly has a lot of heart to it, but I really wish that it was able to pull together a tighter and more memorable experience with less tedium and more demanding content.
Grade: C
