The Swapper Should Have Swapped In Its Metroidvania Roots

The Swapper is an atmospheric indie puzzler infused with Metroidvania-like level design, and a damn nearly flawless game. Its music is ponderous, its clay art assets make for a strange beauty, and its aforementioned puzzles are often wonderfully complex. Credit where credit is due, and all that. Too bad the game is essentially just a puzzler, and nothing else. Had there been another layer to the game—maybe a more organic marriage between the game’s world and its puzzles—then I would likely be all over The Swapper. As-is, I’ve relegated its many successes to a side note in the annals of my collective gaming experience. 

Imagine my dismay at coming to a point, maybe 3 hours or so into The Swapper, where I no longer admired the absolutely fantastic graphical style, or the often contemplative soundtrack. At this point, my previously rational desire to complete the game had given way to no longer being able to see past how The Swapper is essentially just a puzzler. By this, I mean that nothing exists outside of its segmented puzzles. Sure, beyond these discrete rooms lies an illusion of something else surrounding these segments; something that teases at being an organic world teeming with opportunity to use the environment as a puzzle. But once its illusion is made clear, much of the game’s qualities seem to disappear with it.

Unlike Super Metroid, the pioneer of the “Metroidvania game”, there are no new upgrades to be collected in The Swapper. Instead, you are gifted simply with the ability to clone yourself up to four times, with these clones behaving exactly as you do. Jump and they jump, move left and they move left, etc. You are also able to swap between these clones, with certain areas of many of the game’s puzzles limiting your abilities. All of these elements play out nicely, often layering well in complexity as you spend time with the game.

  

Again, unlike Super Metroid and its Metroidvania kin, The Swapper’s game world is all but useless. It simply serves as window dressing, providing the player with the opportunity to marvel at it, without needing to interact with it meaningfully. Because of the lack of upgrades, there is no backtracking in the game, and therefore no secrets hidden in the game’s world.  You simply reach a new area of a derelict ship, read about the game’s telepathic rocks, wonder about none of it, and then proceed to complete whatever puzzles you have access to.

Part of The Swapper’s repetition is mitigated by its ability to instil a philosophical questioning of what happens to the clones once your consciousness swaps from them, and once they meet untimely deaths needed when completing the game’s puzzles. I guess that’s neat. And I guess that I was sort of curious to learn more about the game’s story, which focuses on the aforementioned telepathic stones being able to seep into human beings’ dreams. But often my curiosity was snubbed by yet another puzzle, or yet another sequence where I would move through the game’s quiet and lifeless world in search of a puzzle to solve.

The Swapper, then, like many of its indie kin, is far too singular for my tastes. Its puzzles are sharp, its clay art is beautiful, and its soundtrack is emotive. But its lean focus on creating discrete puzzles means that its world isn’t given the respect that it deserves. If ever there were a sequel, I wish truly that this quality be remedied. Instead of offering gamers rooms of puzzles, why not provide them with a world that is in itself a puzzle? Then it would be like real life, which is exactly how I like my escapist entertainment to feel. Just joking. I enjoy no more than 3 clones of myself to co-exist at once in real life.