The Swapper

Did You Know?

• The Swapper won Best International Game at Freeplay 2011 and Special Recognition Award at Indiecade 2011.
• The game has an aggregate score of 88.09% on GameRankings and 87/100 on Metacritic.

Plot

Humanity exhausts Earth's resources and establishes seven remote outposts in space to extract materials. Station 7 disintegrates into a sun, and Station 6 goes offline. The crew of Theseus explores the desert planet Chori V, finding a durable steel amalgam, an alien life form resembling a silkworm, and complex rock formations called 'The Watchers' that display electro-chemical activity. The crew believes the rocks are telepathic and use their electro-chemicals to create 'The Swapper' device, which clones users and allows consciousness transfer.

A failed person-to-person swap causes memory loss, leading to a ban on such swaps. Dr. Chalmers circumvents the ban by performing brain transplants on terminally-ill patients, hoping to swap consciousness into bodies. Dr. Dennett objects on ethical grounds. The Watchers are later believed to be millions of years old and possibly more intelligent than humans.

Development

The Swapper was created by University of Helsinki students Otto Hantula and Olli Harjola in their spare time. It was backed by the Indie Fund, the sixth indie title the fund supported. The game uses handcrafted clay art assets rather than digital textures. Curve Studios ported the game to PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita, releasing on August 5, 2014 in North America and the following day in Europe after delays to ensure quality. Curve Studios later announced a Wii U version with graphical parity to the PC version. Nintendo assisted in bringing the game to the Japanese market, announced during the April 2015 Nintendo Direct.