The Swapper

The Swapper is another really easy completion that costs... well, a little bit more than free if I’m honest. Obviously I was suffering the after effects of an unforgiving completion in Saints Row II, so targeted a few things that were easy and quick. The Swapper fit the bill but it was also quite challenging.

The Swapper is a puzzle game. You are an astronaut and you crash land on a strange moon. You go in search of a way of repairing the spaceship and stumble upon an old research facility. While exploring here you find the Swapper, an experimental device that had the ability to clone you into positions you could not otherwise reach. It is a bit strange in that you control all of the clones and yourself at the same time so that if you walk left, everyone walks left. This is the puzzle element.

The premise of the game is that you need to find all these energy orbs to further explore the facility to try and find your way off the planet. You soon discover that you are not alone... and this is as far as I will go without ruining the story. It’s worth playing and I would recommend it.

I’ve complained about a lot of space games recently where they try to create the atmosphere of isolation by making the music severely depressing and The Swapper is no exception to this rule. It further loses points though due to the graphical issues that the game suffers from. I’m sure it’s meant to be dark in order to add to the atmosphere but there’s dark and there’s ‘so dark, you can’t see fuck all’ which is just stupid when you are expected to find stuff in a semi abandoned space facility.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

It’s another short one this week. The ten achievements each relate to individual computer screens that are hidden throughout the game. When I say hidden, what I mean is that you need to know where they are in order to find them. Some of them are so obscurely hidden that there is no way you would stumble upon them by mistake, or even for want of looking.

Another thing that’s worth pointing out is that The Swapper is another one of those games that, achievement wise, doesn’t care if you finish it or not. There was no end game reward but tellingly, I finished it anyway. Read into that how you will.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Swapper is short and sweet with some difficult puzzles that will present a real challenge without video solutions. It scores even more points for creating a story that made me want to see it through to conclusion – rare for a puzzle game.