Review: The Swapper

The Swapper is an indie puzzle game, developed by Facepalm Games which, on top of challenging you to complete a large array of puzzles, raises some interesting questions on existentialism and morality. Your nameless and faceless character crash lands on a seemingly deserted space station and, using a cloning tool which it's former inhabitants created, has to find his own way off. You quite soon discover that there is another person aboard the ship, a female scavenger, who seems more clued in on what has been happening there, but uninterested in filling you in on too much at a time. Over the course of the game, through dialogue and crew logs, you discover what happened to the space station and all it's former crew. The game ends with an interesting moral dilemma that for the first time, in a long time, made me actually pause and think - even though it had no real bearing on anything.

The gimmick behind The Swapper, what separates it from other puzzle games, is it's cloning mechanics. You can create up to four copies of yourself, which move in parallel with you, and switch your consciousness between them, as long as they are within your line of sight. Most of the challenges involve positioning your clones in such a way that one of them can pick up an orb whilst the rest are in place on switches or create a line-of-sight network to switch your consciousness along. Only the conscious clone can pick an orb up, and you can only create four clones, so you have to plan everything out carefully. Puzzles are made more difficult by lights; red lights block your ability to swap, blue lights prevent you from creating new clones within an area and purple lights prevent you from doing pretty much anything.

The premise of the game is simple, yet it raises many interesting philosophical questions – what is life? What is consciousness? When you can swap your consciousness to a new body, created seconds ago, and discard the old one – are you still yourself? At first the cloning concept just seemed like a well executed mechanic, but when I discovered that I could traverse vertical spaces, by creating a clone above myself and swapping to it, I was sort of horrified – as old clones are left to die as their soulless bodies fall to the ground, with a bone crunching impact. Clones die often and in a cavalier fashion, but I still found myself wondering about them, and even feeling sorry for them. Gravity also plays an interesting role within puzzles, many rooms have pads that invert gravity for your current clone, and any subsequent ones he makes. There are also some very serene sections where you are floating in zero gravity between sections of the station, using your cloning tool to propel you.

The Swapper looks great, environments are dark and gloomy, and for much of the game light is a commodity. You shine a light where you look, but it is never enough to truly pierce the dark, though there isn't a lot to find between levels, it just adds to the mystique. Puzzle rooms juxtapose this, as they are brightly lit with blue, red and purple lights; they are the places most shrouded in mystery, yet also the ones outwardly hiding the least. The art of the game was created using real world items, which gives it a wonderful claymation vibe, and makes it look truly unique. At the beginning of the game you arrive in a tin can rocket, which initially seems cool and quirky, but nothing else in the game looks so overtly homemade - so it ends up being unauthentic for the game.

Tonally The Swapper feels very reminiscent of the original Alien and Dead Space. It cultivates a great atmosphere through it's subdued use of sound, dark environments and enigmatic approach to storytelling. However, both Alien and Dead Space make their setting feel like real world possibilities for the future, their environments look practical - like people could actually live in them. This is one of the few places that The Swapper fails for me - the space station feels like a husk, where people could never have lived. Though there are no enemies I felt a growing sense of unease as I progressed through the game, how the game sounds reinforces this, especially the dull thud of your heavy shoes on metal runways and air whistling through the vast empty station. 

There is an abundance of indie puzzle games on the market at the moment, though it doesn't feel over-saturated to me, as there are so many interesting and inventive ones still coming out. The Swapper is not a terribly difficult game, I only truly got stuck on one puzzle for a significant amount of time, but I still felt a sense of accomplishment upon completing the game. Throughout the game the developers prod you with rhetorical questions, trying to get you to think more as you play, and this helps make The Swapper more than just another interesting idea, but also one of the most coherent and well executed games I've played all year.
9/10

Review: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

I don't like cowboys; I don't see why people would be attracted to a period of time where dirty, sweaty, gruff men were glorified for being criminals. I may not understand the time; I just thought that I'd say that because, despite this, I warmed to the game in a way I didn't think I would. Gunslinger is a third person shooter, set in the wild west, with a very an arcade feel - as enemies come quick and die fast. Most levels consist of you fighting through waves of enemies and end in either a boss fight or a duel. Skilled shooting results in XP that lets you level up and fills up a bullet time meter that let you slow everything down. The game features a comprehensive, if somewhat short, story mode, as well as an arcade and a duel mode.

Gunslinger is an arcade style shooter where the player takes on the role of a bounty hunter, Silas Greaves, as he recounts the story of his past dealings with many of history's most infamous cowboys, and their bands of outlaws, to a few patrons in a saloon. The majority of the story is told whilst you are playing the game through conversations the characters in the saloon are having, though there are also some multiple picture cut-scenes that, whilst artistic, I found to be lacking. Over the course of the game you discover how Greave’s life intersects those of such figures as Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Gunslinger runs with the idea of an unreliable narrator and executes it brilliantly, as Greaves tells his tale he embellishes it along the way – rewriting the environment and events as you play through, changing how things happened as he remembers things differently, or corrects a discrepancy that someone else points out. The level that most successfully showcases this is about half way through the game; you play through two different versions of a bank heist, told by someone who was there and someone who read about the heist, before Greaves tells them how it actually happened. The unreliable narrator motif and arcade shooter mechanics are a perfect combination as it finally makes sense for one man to guns down hundreds.

The game mechanics are fun, but without the narration the game wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable, as the game often gets quite repetitive - especially if you don't change what weapons you use. There are three different tech trees that let you focus on either duel wielding, close-quarters combat or long range combat, however I found this tied me down, rather than giving me more choice.  The boss fights are dull, as they either consist of you filling a guy with bullets, or running between cover and blowing someone up with dynamite. I found that the final twist was way too predictable, from less than a third of the way through the game I knew how it would end - though the story doesn't have to be that interesting, as the way it is told is.

Overall I was impressed by the whole presentation of the game, the graphics and voice acting were done to a much higher level than I was expecting from a budget game. Gunslinger mixes familiarity and innovation in an interesting way, though struggles with repetitive combat and tired mechanics. The story mode only took me about 4 hours to complete and, whilst this is relatively short for a game, I was satisfied with where it ended.   
7/10