Classical composers have always enjoyed depicting the implausible. Operas based on mythological subjects abound, creating near-impossible staging demands. Musical works based on science fiction are far rarer. Haydn's plodding opera Life on the Moon isn't one of his most scintillating works. More engaging is the first act of Janacek's comedy The Excursions of Mr Brouček, its pickled hero dreaming himself onto the surface of a moon inhabited by a colony of fey artists and intellectuals.

By far the majority of interactive art, entertainment and fiction – videogames for want of a better rubric – could be described as science fiction or fantasy. Very little of what you do when you pick up a gamepad has to do with real life. Even contemporary crime thrillers such as Grand Theft Auto or combat games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare take only a highly-stylised glance at reality. But most games allow you to be and do things that far outstrip any notion of reality.

The lightning speed of the past, Raymond Carver once wrote. There’s no epic distance of space larger than that between the imagined futures of decades past and the way things are now. It’s the Jet-Pack conundrum: it should be here but what have we got? Drones and jogging apps.

Welcome to the future; welcome to the ever-present now. Sci-fi is evergreen – perhaps because, unlike other fictional forms, its primary focus is not one style or historic period. It is constantly holding a slightly warped mirror up to our present concerns and extrapolating, asking "is this what you want?", or "could we go here?" or even "this is what you really are."

The world is getting hotter. Unbearably so. Along Fleet Street, the centre of British newspaper production, on-the-skids, drink-sodden Daily Express reporter Peter Stenning (a square-jawed Edward Judd) begins looking into the reasons for the change. With the help of his charismatic science editor Bill Maguire (a wonderful Leo McKern), he begins piecing things together – nuclear weapons testing has shifted the Earth’s axis. Even worse, the orbit has changed and a spiral towards the sun has begun.

It's Call of Duty, in the future, with Kevin Spacey. For many, the biggest and most important game of the year is here. But for the most part, Advanced Warfare is as conservative and reactionary in terms of innovation as it is in terms of the pro-military, ends-justifies-the-means politics it peddles.

Space, the final frontier. Except that on the slowly dying earth where Christopher Nolan's often awesome sci-fi epic begins, the instinct to reach for the heavens has been crushed by the struggle for survival as crops die and life-choking dust storms sweep across the American midwest.

Never mind Alien vs Predator. Gareth Edwards's rumbustious earth-in-peril spectacular restores Godzilla to the top of the über-monster food chain. He's an indestructible force called from his sub-oceanic lair to combat hideous opponents fuelled by mankind's reckless abuse of Mother Nature.

The key lines are “you’re reborn into an untroubled world” – a world “where everyone’s the same.” The 1956 Don Siegel science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is often taken as a response to America’s fear of Communism and the associated suppression of self, or as a commentary on the encroaching conformity brought by the spread of consumerism and a regimented suburbia. In both cases, homogenisation and standardised behaviour were the potential result.

Which you is you? Where does your soul live? Who cares if a clone of you dies? For a fairly simple puzzle game, The Swapper asks some serious questions. And importantly, it asks them with subtlety, deftness and atmosphere – that enhances the excellent gameplay.