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The Swapper Review
Yet another gleaming jewel in the Playstation 4's estimable indie crown, The Swapper is a near-perfect piece of work. Critically worshipped when it launched on PC last year, it is the work of just two people and yet it manages to be more bracing, immaculately designed and nourishing than most of the multi-million dollar budget monstrosities that are wheeled out each and every autumn.
A work of design ingenuity in more ways than one - it is not only a collection of ceaselessly sly and resourceful puzzles, but also a truly novel piece of interactive storytelling - it's the kind of project that gives indie development the boost in reputation that it so very often deserves.
You play as an astronaut, stranded on a desolate mining planet. In addition to periodically encountering a female counterpart whose intentions are almost perpetually unclear, you also spend the game's opening hours intercepting vague base communications. What happened here, and where have all the people gone? There's ambiguous talk about staff threatening to riot, people leaving their stations without authorisation, misinformation, a contagious illness… all delivered via tiny slivers of carefully written text.
This is fine-tuned and risky storytelling, the kind of which you simply don't find in big-budget video games. The game itself is no less ingenious, and involves you utilising a "swapper" cloning device that both allows you to create several clones of yourself, and subsequently bounce in between them at will. It's a devilish 2D platformer essentially, but it contains some of the most gratifying puzzles ever seen in a platformer this side of Braid.
There are light puzzles, block puzzles, gravity puzzles, puzzles where death is important, puzzles where time is important… and if you ever get stuck? The solution is always to explore the concepts you've discovered. That swapper tool is remarkably powerful and is capable of far more tricks than are initially apparent, so if you get stuck… play around a little. There are some taxing puzzles here to be sure, but you never have to second guess the game's design. The swapper itself is always the key.
The game also boasts a tremendous sense of atmosphere. Before the proper design work began, The Swapper's world was built with real world materials (the character models were all initially rendered in clay, for example) and as such the world feels like the dilapidated set of an old children's TV show, which was a thoroughly jaunty and upbeat environment until things went really, drastically wrong.
Infrequent and spare usage of sinister music only enhances the brilliant sense of unease, and the game doesn't rattle on tirelessly: it ends exactly when it should, highlighting the extreme good taste of its creators yet again. So in short this really is top flight stuff, made all the more inviting by being a cross buy (and cross save) release across PS3, PS4 and Vita. It's pretty much a must-buy.
9/10
Review By Chet Roivas
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