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Spirit Swap‘s candy-colored blocks might call Tetris to mind. Like Tetris blocks, they remain behind my eyelids when I close my eyes, bouncing up and down to a lo-fi beat. More than once I wished I could step through the screen to be immersed in those beats, with no responsibilities other than clearing the board. No thoughts, head empty, glitter explosion.
You play as Samar, a Spirit Swapper. When spirits from the otherworld come flooding into town, it’s your job to find out why and stop them. You do this by Swapping, matching rows and columns of colored spirit blocks in versus matches with your friends around town. As you compete with them to clear spirit blocks, and investigate the mystery of the spirits’ presence, you can also fall in love. It brings together three genres that often overlap in other ways—puzzle game, visual novel, and dating sim—into a polished match-3 game.
The music tracks, as you’d expect from a game with “lofi” in the subtitle, are memorable while also fading into the background when you’re doing your little puzzles. I can’t think of a single track I would be mad to half-listen to while I was doing work. Each character has their own theme and each is a blend of at least two music genres that represent their personality (for example, Kanon’s theme is a blend of trap and jungle). The voice acting is also charming and believable, without being over-expressive.
It’s good the sounds are so good, because you’ll be hearing them on repeat. This game is hard. If you don’t have a match-3 habit already, I recommend playing it on the lowest (“Chill”) difficulty first. I tried the middle difficulty and Spirit Swap humbled me quick. The game has a no-deaths setting and, going even further, an auto-win button if you just want to see the story. As I got better, I was able to move between “Chill” and “Spicy” as I desired.
The two-hour story mode is essentially the tutorial; by its end, I was only at 15% completion. Then you’re released into the wider game where you can have conversations and swap duels with whoever you want. This leans into the chillness the game is going for: With the major conflict out of the way, most of your time with Spirit Swap is spent hanging out with whoever you want, decorating your room with furniture you get as prizes for completing hangouts, and, if you get tired of that, running through endless mode.
This makes the game a little unbalanced, because it’s not just a puzzler with a little flair around the edges. At first it’s all swapping, all the time, and then hanging out takes over. The writing carries these stretches where the game turns into a visual novel for a while, especially because Samar is so fun—she’s someone I’d want to be friends with. But the curse of playing a great match-3 is that the game can feel empty when you aren’t swapping. Also, the pacing hard braking from 100 to 0 means there’s no sense of urgency after story mode is over. The rest of the game is purely relaxing, but there’s a lot of pressure on the individual conversations you’re having with your friends to keep you interested. I enjoyed them, but I wish there had been some overarching goal for the last part of the story, too.
The difficulty also settles unless you kick the game up a level. I didn’t notice a natural difficulty curve over the course of story mode and had to turn to endless for that,which while separate from the story does earn you decor items and can be tweaked to a more exact difficulty.
The ease of the pacing and the flat challenge of the puzzles is accompanied by a (match) third pillar: the peacefulness of the setting. Everyone in Demashq is so nice. Samar never cuts in line. One of your friends is an actual angel. Characters work jobs they love, but everyone has time in the middle of the day to goof off, write music, bake, or do skate tricks. While Spirit Swap has a few deep conversations, at heart it’s a small town beach fantasy where everyone is down to date you. There’s no jealousy: if you’re dating someone, everyone else is happy for you two (or four). The story mode conflict is just silly, and the game knows it, which is why it’s over so fast. Even the directions on endless mode tell you “no stress!”
Everything in Spirit Swap is easy, or more precisely everything is as hard as you want it to be. I knew going in that it was picturing a queer utopia, but what I realized as I played is it’s equally a fantasy of being in control. Everything I did in Spirit Swap, I felt the game had my express consent (or as close as a computer can get, anyway) for whatever was happening to my version of Samar. The game wants you to feel in charge of your choices, and the gameplay allows that through difficulty tweaks and “kissy time?” romance commitment screens. That felt great. What felt less good for me is how it starts and stays peaceful, communicative, and ideal—in other words, the lack of conflict.
It’s not fair to say that there’s no conflict. You have a conversation with Pookie, who runs the skate park, about feeling burdened by his friendships, and you can vent your own stress to your friends in a polycule. And the problems you help others with stretch through their respective social routes. But interpersonal conflicts between you and your friends are always bounded by the conversation that they’re in: everyone is so good-natured that the conflicts end before the scene does.
I realize that “I want more conflict in my match-3 game” sounds kind of like nonsense. But conflict is the bitter to the queer pastoral’s sweet; it makes everything cozy and comfortable stand out more. I wish the small interpersonal conflicts in this game were more foregrounded, and more tied into the main narrative, not resolved in individual conversations. I’m more than fine with the overarching narrative being silly, if the smaller moments had higher stakes.
There’s an expectation that games with racially and sexually diverse casts be about serious topics. I think Spirit Swap is responding to that intentionally. And the choice developer Soft Not Weak has made to make their game chill, comfy, and low-stakes above all else accentuates its vision of an accepting, multicultural society where everyone gets a break. It doesn’t ask much from the player in terms of emotional energy or thinking about complex topics. Some friction was missing, but I understand why.
I like Spirit Swap more as a relaxation tool than a game. And I don’t mean that as a negative: I felt relaxed and in the puzzle zone when I played it. Despite getting better at match-3 as I played, I spent most of my time on the easiest difficulty, because that was what felt the most soothing to me. Its sometimes-basic story is the tradeoff for an experience that’s a lot like mentally taking a hot bath, with plenty of bubbles: soaking in a vision of a better world.
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Kurt Indovina
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