Back in the Swamp review

• Reviews by Serena Nelson
• Published:

Its shallow story might leave you floundering, but it’s an immersive experience in a post-apocalyptic wasteland

I don’t like bugs. Not in the phobic kind of way, but they creep me out. Thus I nearly passed on Back in the Swamp, which seemed to have more than its fair share of particularly nasty insects. But I’m glad that I gave it a go because there’s more than just its many multi-legged creepy crawlies here. There are robots in a state of disrepair, mystery, devastation everywhere, and water…a lot of water. It is a swamp after all. It’s presented as a pretty minimalist node-based slideshow adventure game, but a lot is implied. If you want a deep and engaging story, you might want to look elsewhere. However, if you want a game where you actually have to think about what’s going on, this one might just be up your alley.

The game literally drops you into the action – by a helicopter as it’s downed by some creature. You land in the titular swamp, and it’s up to you to get the hell out of there. Your first step is to get a drone working to dispose of a colony of what I can only describe as giant mutant ants. Then you’re off to a sort of dock or fishing area to continue your journey. It starts off as just an adventure about getting from point A to point B, but as you move deeper into the murk, things start to take shape.

For about the first half of the game, you’re by yourself. With the exception of an encounter with a cute little dog and its owner, there’s nothing but you and the beasts. Lure the dog to give to the man, and he’ll give you an oar for moving on to the next segment of swampland. I really enjoyed the solitude of what is clearly a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Especially in the beginning, you’ll see ruins of buildings, most of them little more than a few walls held up by a floor now, which adds to the oppressive atmosphere.

Before long you find yourself putting together a balloon that you use to fly off to freedom. Or so you think, before a flying wasp-like creature pops the canvas and down you go like a sack of potatoes. Thankfully, you land in a dilapidated area with the parts needed to fix a single-seat, open-cockpit helicopter. Once that’s working and in the air, you’ll get your first glimpse of what’s going on in the world, or at least in your immediate surroundings, showing more of the overgrowth and devastated buildings spread before you from above. 

Aboard your flying machine is a briefcase with three containers and a computer terminal, through which you’re asked by some scientist guy further on to find three samples of mutated creatures. This is the first indication that a plague or infestation has crept into the land, which is what’s causing the wildlife to become so aggressive. As you gather these samples, the experience changes from one of pure isolation to at least showing some semblance of civilization, albeit one of Mad Max-like tribal quality. There are only a couple settlements throughout the game, but they each reveal a little more about the struggles of humankind in this dismal world.

In between, scattered throughout the swamp are what appear to be laboratories and possibly military structures. Perhaps the blight you’re wandering through is manmade? Scraps of paper you find along the way hint that what’s going on is most assuredly not natural. These little tidbits add to the mystery and loneliness I experienced while playing Back in the Swamp. I kept wanting to delve deeper just to see what I could find. But if that wasn’t motivation enough, without spoiling anything, it is implied that your main goal is to create a cure in one of these facilities and put a stop to whatever is infesting the land.

While the landscape is anything but beautiful anymore, this is a beautifully rendered game of mostly still images that give off the feeling of watercolor paintings. There are a few short cutscenes, mostly of you flying around, and transitions between playable nodes are fully animated as well, but overall the artwork is static. Exploring the swamp brought back memories of playing the early Myst games. Moving from area to area is through the use of a fast-travel map, but within each you’ll navigate via on-screen arrows. A magnifying glass tells you there’s something you can zoom in on, and hand icons indicate where you can pick items up or use your inventory on those spots. 

There’s a lot going on with the interface. A black bar taking up the entire bottom ten percent or so of the screen has your inventory and map, a journal of sorts where you store your collection of papers found around the swamp, and in the right-hand corner you’ve got an alternative set of arrows with which you can move around as well. There is even a third option for traversing this world, should you prefer it, as you can move around using the WASD keys on the keyboard, but I opted for the mouse as it’s the most intuitive method. 

Back in the Swamp

Genre:	Mystery, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Slideshow
Theme:	Scavenger hunt, Post-apocalyptic
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Illustrated realism
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Exploration
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

There isn’t much in the way of challenging puzzles, but there are plenty of items littered throughout the swamp that you pick up and use. These range from the mundane, like pieces of wood and nails, to some military hardware like grenades. Every item has a use, even if that use doesn’t become apparent until much later on. If you miss an item or it’s only triggered after a later event, expect a fair amount of backtracking, as some things needed in one area can only be found in another. You’ll combine items in inventory once or twice, but you won’t find any environmental sliding tiles here. I found this simplicity alluring enough as I had to figure out how to use each item for their correct solutions.

Despite all of the dangerous creatures you come across, there is no way to perish in Back in the Swamp. They’ll block your progress, but that’s it. They won’t attack you, and there aren’t any timed events. You’re free to wander around at your own leisure without fear of death or even any nerve-wracking jump scares.

If you need help, there are options for using hints that you can turn on or off. In the top right corner you can click on a sickly green hand icon that will briefly show off all hotspots on the current screen. I found myself using this often, because while the cursor changes to indicate what you can do when hovered over a hotspot, it can be hard to discern what’s part of the background and what is interactive. Another type of help, if enabled, shows what inventory item is required when you click an object that needs one. This is displayed using pictograms in the top bar, which takes up another 10% or so of the screen. A hint made it handy when I had a hard time figuring out how to get past some of the six-legged freaks at certain points.

Speaking of pictograms, there’s absolutely no voice acting in the game, even when interacting with the remaining natives. Instead, a diagram will reveal what they want and the means to get it. A good example is when one person is willing to give you a gas mask for future use in exchange for a bundle of grapes. He doesn’t say anything like, “Give me grapes, and I’ll give you this mask,” even via subtitles. Rather, a wordless grapes => gas mask pictogram popup appears instead. This not only adds to the charm of the game, it helps in giving you an idea of what exactly the item you need looks like. 

There’s no music in the game either. Well, with the exception of having to blast someone’s eardrums out with the use of a heavy metal cassette tape late in the game. Everywhere else, the silence is just filled with ambient noises. You hear the clang of your own footsteps on iron platforms; the splash of water; the natural chirping, croaking, and buzzing of the insects and other creatures; and the metallic movement of robots that you eventually manage to get working again. Frankly, from my experience, adding musical undertones would have taken away from the desolation of a post-apocalyptic setting filled with deadly beasts. I was more immersed in the sounds of the swamp than anything else here.

If you’re looking for hard answers to what is going on in this place, you’re on your own to piece together everything you can for yourself. I had to infer a lot going through Back in the Swamp, and it’s very possible my interpretation will be different than another player’s. The only thing I knew for sure by the end was just how devastated the landscape was and that all I wanted to do was escape alive with the (potential) cure I was entrusted with procuring.  I was dead set on making things right, even if how to use this miracle elixir eluded me throughout. The ending, unfortunately, is rather abrupt and left me with a few too many unanswered questions. That said, the experience, which lasted only about three hours for me, left me mulling it over even after I was done. Would anything I did actually matter? Who knows, but it was the journey that kept me enthralled.

Final Verdict

Back in the Swamp may be a rather short game, and there’s little in the way of defined story and lore to make sense of it all, but sometimes a game just wants you to explore and experience a world the developers built for you. It’s clear that something bad happened here, and the oppressive isolation of the environment – even when you arrive at a couple populated settlements – just keeps adding to the atmosphere and the feeling of being alone, perhaps with the fate of what’s left of the world resting entirely in your hands. In all, this is a game to look at and listen to – to experience – more than anything else. And I’m fine with that in a game as effective as this one is at establishing player immersion.

Serena played Back in the Swamp on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.