The Swapper is an interesting physics-based puzzle game whose gameplay might best be described as a morbid take on the Double Cherry from Super Mario 3D World. You duplicate yourself to solve puzzles, gather items, and move through an abandoned space station; it isn’t terribly nuanced. When you jump, your clones jump. When you move left or right, your clones move left or right. The unsettling depth comes from the ability to transport—or “swap”—direct control between your clones so that their inevitable death is not YOUR death. It is strongly implied that you are swapping your mind or perhaps your soul between manufactured bodies.

The story is mostly uneventful. You seemingly are an astronaut transported to an abandoned space station, and your goal (I assume) is to leave and, while you’re doing that, figure out what happened. Along the way, you’ll encounter the rare NPC and a bunch of talking space rocks. The plot did not get into Moon or Oblivion territory like I assumed it would, and seems to focus more on the talking rocks. This was disappointing to me, as the moral and ethical ramifications of creating largely disposable clone bodies are far more interesting to me, and while those issues are raised, they aren’t really explored. You’ll spend most of your time exploring the space station until you can’t activate some piece of equipment without X number of power orbs, requiring you to run around finding puzzle rooms with orbs sitting in very inconvenient places. Of course, you must use your clones to get an orb. The trick is that you must be controlling the clone that collects it for the pickup to “count.” Various obstacles complicate things—colored lights that inhibit cloning, swapping, or both, and gravity wells that act like conveyor belts. I was impressed by how hands-off the game is; after telling you about cloning, swapping, and pushing/pulling objects, you’re basically left to your own devices and you have to figure out how to get around from there.

This approach leads to a lot of “eureka” moments. One particularly effective example involved a vertical shaft and an offset area where the orb sat. How do I get to that orb? And once I do, how do you get back up that long, vertical shaft? That was another eureka moment with disturbing consequences. I find the game is enjoyed best in small doses. It gets very easy to start overthinking a particularly vexing puzzle, and coming back to it the next day, with fresh eyes, often leads to success. The game has also been out for awhile on other platforms, so if you’re ever completely stuck, there are FAQs to help you out (or you could hit up Miiverse). Incredibly, much of the game is photo-realistic, as it was created in the same way one would craft a stop-motion animated film.

Unfortunately, the dark lighting and small characters make this detail difficult to appreciate. Unlike Skullmonkeys or Primal Rage, the game does not wear its Claymation roots on its sleeve. The sound design is unique and unsettling. Aside from the creepy atmosphere of the space station itself, the horrific impact noise of your clone’s corpses after a lengthy drop is always uncomfortable. I do have a few complaints: the game’s map is displayed on the Wii U GamePad, but I didn’t find it particularly helpful aside from gauging my own distance from whatever my goal was. I wish you could zoom in; there were many times were I didn’t notice a moveable object because everything is so damn small. Your character’s running and jumping animations look half-baked, and I was constantly irritated by the fact that he (or she) walks forward or backward, and will only turn around when you use the right stick to look somewhere else. I was reminded of The Fall, another space game I recently reviewed. There were times I wished the camera would zoom OUT in that game. Here, I wish it would zoom IN.

But the core gameplay—puzzle-solving with clones—is distinctly enjoyable. In a way, it reminded me of the Clank puzzles in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, but on a 2D plane. If that kind of puzzle-solving is up your ally, I’d give The Swapper a try.