The Swapper Review: impossible soul

You are every clone, and every clone is you. And yet, every clone is dispensable. Death is the gameplay. The making and disposing of clones is as necessary as walking and jumping.

There are no enemies to kill in The Swapper; the only corpses are your own. By the conclusion, it was impossible to remember which recreation of "myself" I was. The 100th? The 1,000th? The best way to get me to care about all the people I kill in a video game, it turns out, is making all of those people me.

The creators of The Swapper have infused a commentary on identity, mortality, science and faith into the actual playing of their game. That is to say, without prose, dialogue or cinematics, the game would be no less a work of science fiction. This is brilliant game design, in which a smart hook — creating and disposing of clones to solve puzzles — is literalized in an unsettling metaphor: exhausting one's body and possibly one's soul to achieve progress.

The developers have also included a mysterious woman, a series of text logs and talking rocks — yes, rocks that talk — throughout the environment to explain the story in an elliptical, jabberwocky way. The spoken story is less interesting than the unspoken one, and clumsier too. The otherwise affective climactic scene is tarnished by an incessant scrawl of text.

Beyond the metaphysical mind bending, The Swapper offers plenty of mental calisthenics. The puzzles — imagined as rooms and chambers within the space station — are organized in a way that gradually teaches the player to speak the game's language. Complex obstacles like colorful lights that prevent swapping and cloning are introduced individually, then together, so that no puzzle seems impossible, unfair or overwhelming; and yet, each puzzle is difficult enough that realizing a solution triggers a brief intellectual high.