POSTED 10/8/14


THE SWAPPER

Curve Studios

You’re going to die...

Once in this lifetime, innumerable times in The Swapper.

It’s not about a footy card collector, somebody who replaces bulgy rubbish bags with empties or a transformer trying to avoid litigation. It’s about you, clones of you, puzzles and stuff.

Imagine if Metroid’s Samus had a serious Ripley fixation, mind-melded with GLaDOS, got booted to the farthest reaches of deepity-deep space and had to solve increasingly brain-boggling puzzles to escape a blasted spaceship and the desolation within.

That’s a simple précis of what’s happening in The Swapper, but there’s much more at play. You can’t just lumber along jumping everywhere that you need to jump. Well, not without help from an experimental doobrie that allows you to clone yourself up to four times at a time. Can’t reach that platform? Clone a you up in the air, switch into it, fwoosh another clone into existence now that you’ve line of sight over that pesky platform, switch into it then land safely.
You just killed yourself, twice.

Putting aside all manner of existential angsty mishegas that may floddop through your mind should it have a deep end in which thinkular stuff can paddle, more simply The Swapper’s a brilliant – albeit brief - puzzler. Things start reasonably easy. Then – about two minutes into proceedings - they get harder. Then harder. Then harderer. Then hardererer...

It’s reasonably steady progression-wise though, as new tricks ‘n’ tactics are introduced.

It’s also pretty – in a deserted space station metal-versus-nature kinda way, of course. This visual lushness is accompanied by a slightly creepy, very organic soundtrack (in the true sense of the word, that’s not us being smart arsey in implying there’s Hammond all over it). If you dig atmosphere, The Swapper oozes it.

So it could use some soft toilet paper...

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