LogFAQs > #919500011

for sure! i have to catch myself and actively focus on positives when i talk about things, because it's so much easier to creatively critique than creatively praise

#53: The Swapper

Now this is a traditional puzzle game that really explores what it can do with the mechanics.

I call The Swapper a foil to Waking Mars because they're similar in length, genre, and camera perspective. Plus, you're an astronaut in both of them. You're going around solving puzzles, but in this one the challenge is greater and the tone more somber. Mercifully, there are easier and harder goals within each level, and you only have to get a certain number of them over a group of levels to progress to the next batch.

I thought it was a great system! The kick in the nuts towards the end is that in order to actually get the game's normal ending- not the secret ending- you have to go back and make sure you've gotten 100% of those pickups. Why let me skip them in the first place then?

Anyway, the game has a light story and poses a minor philosophical question about consciousness. The primary mechanic involves you creating duplicates of yourself that act simultaneously with you in all actions, and you can 'swap' which one is your primary body with your titular swapper gun. Traps block your path, mists block your swapper, and you don't have a jetpack so just getting around is a challenge. Anyway, it's engaging and about all you can ask for from a hard-boiled puzzle game.

As a side note, I was already a firm believer that consciousness will never be truly transferrable. Sure, you could upload a copy to the cloud and into another brain, but your original brain will still be sitting there at home, dying of whatever malady you wanted to escape. The real questions should be more detail oriented- should it be legal to make copies? Personally, is it more rewarding to create as close to a perfect copy as possible, make a traditional copy (child via birth), or to pass on as much of your philosophy to others regardless of physical relation? Does any of it matter after you're dead? Anyway, I had already decided what i felt from two minutes in, but The Swapper still framed it well.

Thought provoking game, strong to infuriating puzzles, punishing towards the end.
---

You did indeed stab me in the back. However, you are only level one, whilst I am level 50. That means I should remain uninjured.