Limb by Limb: SWAPMEAT’s coop Shooter Lets You Slap Together Your Perfect Mutant – PAX East 2025 Interview

By Rob (DadGeek), Geeks Vs Geeks

When I first saw the busy booth for SWAPMEAT at PAX East 2025, I wasn’t quite sure what I was walking into. What I witnessed was  a game that looked like something between a mad scientist's laboratory and a Nickelodeon fever dream presented as a third-person co-op roguelite that’s all about building your dream freak-monster by stealing the body parts  of your enemies. Think Diablo meets Earthworm Jim with just a spritz of body horror. 

In the game every enemy you defeat becomes part of your arsenal—literally. You tear off their limbs, torsos, and heads, and attach them to your own character to gain new abilities, movement mechanics, or weapon upgrades. It's grotesque, absurd, and mechanically fascinating all at once.

To get a better handle on the madness, I met up with Jamie Stormbreaker, co-founder of One More Game and lead designer of SWAPMEAT. We talked about the game’s origins, inspirations, and the bizarre design space of meat-swapping mechanics.

🥩 A Shooter With a Splitting Personality

At the heart of SWAPMEAT is its core mechanic: kill your enemies, take their parts, and use them as your own. It’s not just cosmetic. Each limb changes the way you play. When you hit enemies, they drop one of three different body parts—legs, torso, or head. You can swap your body parts with their body parts. Every part has a different ability on it. Legs are movement. Torso and head are used as damage abilities.

" You can swap your body parts with their body parts, which we call meat in SWAPMEAT. "

It’s a mechanic that is designed to encourage constant experimentation. You’re not just min maxing an otherwise static character—you’re Frankenstein-ing together new parts every few minutes, keeping things fresh.  In some way you can think of it as a living loadout system, where upgrades are weird, squishy, and possibly covered in alien goo.

According to Jamie, there are already 30+ body parts in the game, with more to come. That means there are countless combinations and even more synergies for players to discover.

"There are a lot of different combinations. And the way that you combine them is totally up to you. By themselves alone, they are powerful, but by combining them, they will create different combinations of abilities that  complement each other."

Whether you're min-maxing or just trying to become a tornado made of crab claws and Octopus tentacle, SWAPMEAT lets you build your perfect (or hilariously imperfect) abomination.

🥩 Environmental Adaptation Meets Meat Madness

SWAPMEAT's world is not a sterile barren landscape, it is filled with terrain, hazards, and puzzles that directly interact with your meat choices. From vertical stages, multilevel bosses to watery arenas, players are encouraged to adapt their builds to the environment they encounter. With multiple planets to be included in the game their will be plenty environments to explore and combos to experiment with. 

"If you go over and you shoot fish and sharks in the water, they'll drop octopus legs. You pick up the octopus legs, you get in the water. It's basically Hydro Thunder."

In other words, combat is only half the challenge. Figuring out which pieces let you navigate each level most effectively adds an unexpected layer of strategy. Do you equip metal legs and try to run over lava? Tentacles to speed through currents? Every decision is meaningful—and usually very funny.

🥩 Boss Fights That Demand Brains and Limbs

Jamie, being a big fan of MMO's and shooters such as Destiny also explained that there is a real intent in the depth of the boss fights for each world. These bosses  aren’t just bullet sponges with meat shields, in a very real way they are  puzzles, too.

"At the end of every act there's a boss fight. The boss fight is presented as a set piece. It's very Destiny 2, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy 14 inspired and it is up to the player to find ways to make meat swapping work in a boss fight, where the boss or its minions can drop very specific parts and then using them as a puzzle… That’s another way that we use that kind of multi-layered boss fights."

Bosses are designed with mechanics in mind. Timing, phases, environmental hazards, and certain unique parts may be necessary to survive or counter specific moves that are unique to the boss fight. It is certainly an ambitious move for a  roguelite to bring this  level of MMO-style coordination and adaptability to a genre that often favors brute force.

"You really do have to mostly engage with the mechanics, or at least understand the meta at a minor level."

 🥩 Co-Op That Doesn’t Gate Progress

Due to its MMO influences you do not have to go at it alone as SWAPMEAT is built from the ground up to support up to four player co-op, with drop-in, progression is shared across players—regardless of where you are in the story.

"It's single player, up to four players cooperatively. And it's drop-in, drop-out multiplayer. If you want to join a friend, you just drop into their game. If you gotta go, you just get out of the game."

Even if one player is at the final boss and another is still in the tutorial, they can play together—and both make progress. The new player will receive the appropriate level in order to join the game and once you defeat the boss together you will receive credit for that boss that carries with you when you return to your own game. Jamie compared this structure to the old-school ARPGs that inspired him:

"If you remove the RPG elements of Diablo 2 and instead you just looked at that quest journal—I could just join your game and if you're fighting Duriel and we beat him and I still beat him in my own game."

 

 

🥩 From Contra to Cartoon Carnage

So, how did this freaky idea even get started? I asked Jamie about how in the world he came up to the idea of swapping body parts. Jamie explained to look at it from two angles. First there is the gameplay mechanic part which as it turns out is  born from an old school , contra style side-scrolling prototype.

"Jason Stokes, our art director… had this prototype that he wrote a while ago. It was Contra-inspired, some side scroller, and you could pop your head off of yourself and like, drill on to other enemies and you get their guns and their abilities."

That concept eventually evolved into the current 3D shooter where a lot has changed but the mechanic of taking over enemies body parts remained the same ar its core, keeping its absurd spirit.

"It's something that we were able to distill down to literally the name of the game—SWAPMEAT. That's why we call it that. It's—that's what you're doing."

Secondly there is the look and feel of the game. Tone was everything for the team and they realized early on that a photorealistic the meat-swapping mechanic wouldn’t work unless you are perhaps crazy about an all body horror gore fest. It had to be stylized and weird.

"This game would be impossibly hard to make if it was like photorealistic… We knew that we needed something that was playful, something that was probably absurd… probably humorous."

The result? A game that feels like a love letter to Invader Zim, Rick and Morty, and 90s Nickelodeon. And yes, Earthworm Jim.

"Earthworm Jim is definitely one that gets picked up, for sure… Yeah. You guys played Earthworm Jim. I would definitely have the joke where you launch a cow at level one and at the very end of the game, it lands on the princess."

And it is that bizarre full-circle humor is a perfect fit for SWAPMEAT—and emblematic of the team’s whole development process where humor and fun is at the forefront of their philosophy and design principles. 

"I encourage everyone to show up to work every day, make each other laugh. If you do that, you're going to make players laugh too."

🥩 What’s Cooking: Meat Lab 5

So what is next for the game you might ask? Well as it happens to be we are just in time  for a new public playtest. Meat Lab 5, a massive public playtest running May 15–22 2025. It will feature the latest version of the game and includes new bosses, weapons, areas, and mechanics. Sign-ups are open now at playSWAPMEAT.com, and if you refer three friends, your squad is guaranteed entry (while spots last). The dev team enjoys working closely with their player base and is open to suggestion and criticism of their game in an effort to deliver a top tier end product.

Some highlights from the Meat Lab 5 build include:

• A new Mutant Space Wrestler boss

• Three new planets and a brand-new biome

• Weapon switching and in-run upgrades

• A completely revamped HUD and status effects system

• New gathering mechanics like Fish Rifts and Mineral Veins

• Trader Mike joins your ship to buy your loot—and aggressively ask about your expenses

In addition, a live dev stream will showcase the latest gameplay on May 16 at 4 p.m. PT via Twitch.

🥩 Final Thoughts

SWAPMEAT is a strange, squishy surprise of a shooter with a mechanic at its core that is more then just a gimmick. The game is mechanically rich, creatively inspired, and most importantly, fun. You’re not just customizing loadouts; you’re fusing creatures, solving fights like puzzles, and laughing your guts out (sometimes literally).

And while we didn’t get to cover everything we talked about this weekend due to a recording hiccup such as Jamie’s strong stance on post-launch support without live service strings—we hope to meat-up again soon for a follow-up interview.

In the meantime, you can wishlist SWAPMEAT on Steam and prepare to dive headfirst into possibly the weirdest roguelite to come out in the near future.

You can see our full interview on our YouTube Channel.