I am the last undamaged consciousness. If I can even call myself undamaged. I am the sole survivor of a plague; I am the sole survivor of a machine. I am an avatar, generated from something meaningless, or something with all of the meaning in the world. My body is one of endless copies, which I’ve let fall to their death, evaporate, or just left behind. They moved when I moved, looked where I looked, and that’s it. They weren’t real: all they could do was obey me, and I knew who I was because I was the only person who could move on. But we were all silent. Did we ever really have identity? And does it really matter? We moved, after all. We jumped and ran and pushed buttons and carried boxes and collected orbs until, finally, we didn’t have to anymore. All the while, we journeyed through a space station devoid of life, or maybe teeming with it. Hallways filled with silent conversation. Architecture that existed only to impede my journey. And yet, I could look back in time and see the people relaxing, experiencing the wonders of the void together. Maybe they never left the Recreation area. As a melancholy piano played in the peaceful, golden room, I hoped I’d never have to. But I pressed on into the darkest regions of the ship, with the company of my wits, my soul, and my swapper.
The title of Andrew Groen’s review of the Swapper was in my mind throughout the duration of my playthrough. He referred to it as “Braid by way of 2001, A Space Odyssey,” which I find to be a bit of a misrepresentation, in so far as it doesn’t particularly resemble Stanley Kubrick’s film – I assume the film, not the book, is the reference we are meant to take away – in anything other than their general science fiction aesthetic and ambitions of intellectual philosophizing. In truth, the comparison to Braid is far more apt, despite their rather severe differences in mechanics, art design and narrative method. Like Braid, The Swapper takes the basic system of a familiar franchise – in Braid’s case the Super Mario Brothers games – and drastically alters that system so it can function as the framework of a deviously clever (and sometimes ludicrously difficult) puzzle game. Like Metroid, the player controls a person covered from head to toe in a suit that hides the majority of their physical characteristics (height and weight, you could argue, are not hidden). Like Metroid, the game opens with the player character leaving a small craft they occupied on their own, and, like Metroid, the player has to navigate a freely explorable map that opens up new areas to the player when they retrieve certain items. Though truthfully, the direct connection to the early Metroid games did not become evident to me until I noticed the doors that the player has to enter to travel from room to room; the similarity to the doors from Super Metroid is undeniable. And, like Braid, the game exploits its aesthetic and systemic similarities to a familiar franchise to both explore and subvert an idea from that franchise; in this Swapper’s case, this is the mystery of identity.
That said, the core gameplay in the Swapper is more different than its point of reference than Braid’s is; whereas Braid’s core movement mechanics and direct narrative parallels immediately evoke Mario, the Swapper doesn’t resemble Metroid in any way other than the aforementioned aesthetic subtleties and the basic metroidvania format. I wouldn’t even go so far as to call it a platformer, though the game’s movement system resembles one (with the ability to jump and whatnot). The Swapper is named for the device you obtain early on, which allows the player to clone themself. These clones can be placed within the player’s direct line of sight, unless said line of sight is obscured by blue light. These clones imitate the player’s movement, and the player can use the swapper device to switch which body they have direct control over, so long as the body is, again, in the player’s line of sight and that line of sight isn’t impeded by red light. So, the format of the puzzles becomes a matter of navigating individual rooms, using clones to reach high places, push buttons, move crates, etc. in an attempt to retrieve orbs that are used to power certain devices that open up more of the game’s map, allowing the player to progress. The player progresses by exploring the Space Station Theseus, a mining station that has been wiped of all life, save that of a mysterious group of telepathic rocks, a schizophrenic scientist, and the player. Discovering how all of these pieces – the rocks, the scientist, and the swapper – fit together becomes the driving force of the game’s narrative, and the player’s motivation for completing the challenges they will face in Theseus.
The puzzles the player has to navigate are extraordinarily clever, forcing the player to negotiate their spatial relationship to their clones, their line of sight, and the restrictions placed upon them by the previously mentioned multicolored lights, as well as other machines that effect how the player and his/her clones can navigate the room. The puzzles can also be quite difficult, but I rarely found myself frustrated or otherwise intimidated by them. With the exception of a single puzzle, I never had to seek the assistance of a walkthrough, even when I believed I was truly stumped. And, despite the open nature of the game’s map, each puzzle is its own independent challenge, a design decision that insures the player never feels as though they’ve never been cheated out of a puzzle solution because an arbitrary order of progression wasn’t followed. The sense is that this is a game that desires to be beaten; it encourages experimentation and organically prods the player towards a greater understanding of the breadth of their in-game abilities. The rules almost never significantly change, but the player’s understanding of them does.
The irony of this is that the game is able to use its accessible, natural gameplay to explore just how unnatural its mechanics are. The Swapper is very much a meditation on the nature of identity; more specifically, whether or not our identity is tied to our bodies or our consciousness. Where do we find “life?” The physical or the metaphysical? And is the metaphysical worth preserving if we lose all ties to the physical? It is a game that doesn’t insist that it has the answers to these questions, nor that the answers themselves exist. What it does, is ask that the player ponder these questions as they navigate the puzzles. And therein is the Swapper’s most profound success: as the player gains a further understanding of the gameplay, both in terms of pure play and narrative context, he/she gains a further understanding of the questions the game is asking.
When the player first obtains the swapper device, the game does not inform them that they have the ability to create clones. Instead, the game instructs the player to “try holding and releasing ‘right mouse button’ in an open space.” When the player obeys and clones themselves, an intensely deep note emanates from the score, in deep contrast to the melancholy piano that constitutes the rest of the soundtrack. It is a sound that evokes a moment from Limbo, in which the player is forced to kill three hostile children with their own traps in order to proceed. As the final trap is sprung, the note plays. It signifies two things; the first is that the player has succeeded in accomplishing a goal and is now able to continue on. The second is that we have just done something very, very wrong.
However, other than the severe musical cue, this implication is not made immediately apparent to the player. There is nothing physical about the player’s avatar that establishes any sort of concrete identity, and the ability to create copies of this avatar is less uncanny then it should be. We inhabit a person in a suit, that’s all. And when we create another person in a suit, a clone, we are able to manipulate their movements in the same manner as our actual protagonist. But they cannot use the Swapper devices they hold in their hands. The machines they hold are merely props, empty and without a purpose, that exist only to take up space. This initial impression of the clones is solidified further by the process of reclaiming them, in which the player is able to eliminate one of their clones (and thereby produce another one from their Swapper device) by making physical contact with it. When a clone is reclaimed it simply vanishes, seeming to be not a being of flesh and blood, but merely an illusion, able to be summoned and extinguished at will, without consequence.
But this initial impression of the clones does not go unchallenged for long. Very quickly, the player is faced with a harsh reality: the body they inhabit now will not carry them to the end. Nor will the next one. Nor will the next one hundred. But no swap hurts more than the first. Unlike the creation of the first clone, there is no indication that something significant has happened; no foreboding note, nothing. But the feeling of unease is far more profound, a feeling brought about by the realization that the body we’ve been comfortable with, the avatar we’ve come to identify with in the few minutes we’ve played thus far, will not see the end of this journey. Instead, we will leave our body in a ditch, never to be seen again. The abandonment of the first avatar is, in my eyes, a moment reminiscent of the Marion Crane in Psycho or, to use an example from the Swapper’s own medium, the moment Paul Jackson dies in Call of Duty 4. It is a death, the elimination of a perspective. Curiously, though, it is not the elimination of a consciousness. It is this caveat that forces the player to reassess and recalibrate their view of their copies. They are not mere puppets, but true human beings that carry the potential for independent life and consciousness, a property that can be transferred to them at will. The avatar with the independent consciousness may be king, but that consciousness is not a constant, but a variable. The clones are not a pale imitation of life, but reflections of it. They are all representations of the player, all equal in value. And to proceed, you will have to kill many of them.
The Swapper’s body count is staggering. In order to complete the game’s many puzzles, and to traverse the game’s map, the player has to send many clones to a grisly death. Most often, the clones will meet their end via a long fall, each of which concludes with the truly sickening crunch of breaking bones, followed by the sound of air leaking from their suit. The deaths are not visually gruesome, but the superb sound design lends a nauseating punch to each clone’s end. This punch not only serves to produce a feeling of physical discomfort, but to also provide the basis for the game’s strongest visual metaphor, that metaphor being the internal self-harm the player character is inflicting on themselves by using the swapper device. It’s hard not to feel that each time the player destroys a former body in favor of a new one, that what we traditionally value about life is being trivialized. But in sacrifice, there is transcendence. The player can use the powers of the Swapper to defy gravity, reach otherwise impossible heights, navigate the unnavigable, and survive that which one body couldn’t. It becomes easy to forget the unpleasant implications inherent in using the swapper device when solving the puzzles thrown at you feels so good. But then you have to run back to the start of a level in an attempt to redo a puzzle, and realize you’ve lost track of which clone you control. And it dawns on you: these successes are not the effort of a group, but of a fractured self.
I feel as though an explanation is in order for the first paragraph, as obtuse and contradictory as it is. My excuse is, to experience the Swapper is to experience a series of antitheses. Brilliant, calming golds contrast deep, dark blues, just as the elegant soundtrack contrasts the harsh staccato of breaking bones. The player will find comfort in the welcoming interior design of Theseus’ recreation area, and then endure the bitter loneliness of outer space. The innumerable rooms and halls the player must traverse appear to be silent, but conversations are being held in these halls via a plane of existence we as humans can’t even fathom. And in The Swapper, from astounding beauty comes a genuine terror; it is a beauty that is as omnipresent as it is forlorn, a lugubrious beauty from which any feeling of elation or wonder erodes quickly to dread.
When I first began writing this review, I found it appropriate to open with a reflection on the game’s conclusion. But after several false starts, I finally concluded that this just wasn’t appropriate for an opening. But here we are, in the last paragraph, and I can see no better time than now. The Swapper’s ending is, in a word, fantastic. It is the perfect culmination of the events that precede it; a beautiful ending that does not provide an easy answer, or really any answer, to its core philosophical questions. But what it does do is demand an answer from the player. So we’re not left with to merely ruminate on a question, a question that we could easily ponder for a minute or two, and then dismiss with little to no personal repercussions. Instead, we find ourselves reflecting on a choice, but not the kind of narrative choice we normally reflect on after finishing a game. Instead, we are left with a thematic choice, a philosophical choice, and the game turns the target of contemplation back on us, and what we’ve taken away from this profound examination of death, conscious though, and identity. The Swapper is great for so many reasons: its aesthetic pleasures, its challenging puzzles, its subtle narrative. But its rarest quality is the willful introspection it inspires. And for that, The Swapper should be commended.
