Have you played The Swapper? If not, you should swap whatever you’re doing right now for playing The Swapper. Originally released back in 2013, it’s a sci-fi puzzler that hinges on your ability to create clones of yourself, which then mimic your every movement. From this simple concept, The Swapper produces some delightfully brain-tangling puzzles, and a story that probes the question of personal identity with discomforting acuity. Oh, and it’s all wrapped in eerie, Claymation-based art that still looks beautiful today.
But not beautiful enough, according to developers Facepalm games. Over the last week or so, Facepalm has been steadily uploading a sequence of updates to The Swapper’s beta-build, culminating in the game’s first proper Steam update in 11 years. “The original purpose of this release was addressing bit rot that had accumulated over the years,” writes Facepalm in a Steam blog. “But we couldn’t resist including some visual, aural and input adjustments that make the game feel a bit smoother.”
The various touch-ups to the Swapper include the addition of light dithering, enhanced edges when depth of field is switched on, updated textures, and bump-map anti-aliasing. Audio, meanwhile, has been enhanced with more natural sound panning and a slightly louder text blip. Finally, the update includes a bunch of bug fixes, ranging from tiny changes like correcting a typo in a subtitle, to fixing an issue where accessing hidden terminals caused “catastrophic failure”.
Facepalm says the visual and audio updates are “subtle enough that they could go unnoticed if you’re not looking for them”, so they’ve added a legacy branch to Steam letting players see what the game looked like before the update. The legacy branch retains the essential stability fixes, though, so you can enjoy the original visuals without worrying about bugs or crashes.
Aside from these quality-of-life additions, The Swapper is now Steam Deck verified. This appears to have happened shortly after the update’s launch, as the update post has been edited to specify the verification, originally stating “We hope it will be reviewed for official compatibility soon.”
In any case, The Swapper seems tailor-made for handheld gaming, even though it released years before the Steam Deck was a twinkle in Gaben’s eye. If you fancy giving it a whirl in portable mode, Facepalm notes that “The main branch is recommended when playing handheld because the visual stability improvements have a more noticeable effect on smaller resolutions.”
While The Swapper is the only game to be developed by Facepalm as an entity, its director Olli Harjola went on to create the gleefully chaotic (and enormously successful) roguelike Noita. Meanwhile, the Swapper’s writer, Tom Jubert, cowrote the story for The Talos Principle and wrote parts of the sequel, both of which share thematic elements with Facepalm’s puzzler.
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