Metamorphosis is a unique game inspired by Franz Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis. It has been developed by Ovid Works while All in! Games has taken the responsibility of publishing the title. We’ve seen some great titles come under the umbrella of All in! Games recently and Metamorphosis is no different. Metamorphosis is a game about a man who wakes up one morning and he has transformed into an insect. Your task is to find the secret behind the transformation and you only have your body and a small set of insect skills. This is our review of Metamorphosis in which we explore a bizarre world of insects to unravel the secret behind our transformation.
Metamorphosis follows the story of Gregor who is a regular salesman but wakes up one day to find out that he has transformed into an insect. Your main goal in the game is to find out the secret behind your untimely transformation into an insect and this begins your epic journey through a bizarre world full of insects and wacky characters. The game is played in a first-person view and features strong puzzle-solving and platforming mechanics. While strictly linear, the environments in the game are pretty big and offer you the freedom to explore them at your will before moving on to the next area.
My favorite aspect of Metamorphosis is its gameplay. I loved how the game develops the character of Gregor in the early stages of the game as after he wakes up, he is an insect but he does not know it yet. As you continue playing the game, you see how the voice of Gregor changes and how his front insect limbs come into his view after he realizes that he is now an insect. His first priority is to find and notify his friend but his friend is seemingly being framed into a false case and this is how the story of the game continues. As you play the game, you further delve deeper to find out how you turn into an insect and also the progression of your friend’s case.
Playing as an insect surely has its downfalls but it also opens a brand new world for you. You are small so everything around you is bigger. Even other bugs are more muscular and bigger than you so you are relatively small even in the world of insects. You have to find unique ways to perform tasks which would be pretty normal to complete if you were a human. There are different in-game mechanics that help you in your navigation. Deep down, Metamorphosis is a puzzle game so finding the way is not always the easiest task for you.
To solve your puzzles, you will have to use nothing else then your tiny insect body. Because of this, the puzzles most of the time simply require that you find a correct solution from your environment. Such as pressing a hidden button, reading the right documents, or finding smaller hidden objects such as keys. Apart from puzzle-solving, you will also complete many platforming sequences in the game as well. Most of these sequences will require you to climb around using special sticky substances which is most of the cases is mustard.
General movement is done on everyday objects such as forks, books, shelves, tables, and pencils. Since you are small, everything is extremely huge around you. Even a pencil looks like a giant bridge just waiting for you to climb on it and reach higher spaces. You will also need to use sprint and jumps to navigate through your environment. You will meet plenty of colorful insect NPCs throughout the game. You can meet them and speak with them. Some of these are cool while some of them are absolutely weird such as a leader of a cult preaching insects to go against the Tower or an Insect who owns a Jazz club inside a Record Player.
The world of Metamorphosis feels really alive around you. In every sequence, there is plenty of action happening around you whether you are in the human world or the insect world. This really immerses you in the game and offers plenty of fun sequences that just keep you going and going through the story of the game. Each environment is unique and each environment brings new challenges, puzzles, and characters for you to experience and interact with.
Probably one of the most enjoyable sections of the game is its insect-infested areas where you explore complete areas and settlements where insects are living. The world of insects and the world of humans are interlinked with each other and quite often, you will move between them to perform different tasks and solve puzzles here and there. Different levels move between both of the worlds as you try to progress in the game while certain levels of the game are completely based in either the human side of the world or the insect side of the world. It is essentially the same world but they are completely different from one and another.
The world of humans is normal and just like you would expect them to be. Each time you return back to the human world, you are in a different place but the story follows right exactly where it should be. On the other hand, the world of insects is dirty, has many more hazards for you to watch out but it looks pretty in its own way. Some of the locations in the game are just brilliant to explore but since the game follows a traditional, linear approach for its story, you rarely go back to the same area again.
With all that said, Metamorphosis is not short of its problems at this point with the biggest one being that it has not been optimized well for running on PCs. For a game that offers such a unique concept with brilliant gameplay and a lovely art style, having such performance issues that ruin your gameplay is an absolute bummer. The PC I used for this review is a very powerful AMD Ryzen 7 machine that has 32GB, 3600MHz of Ram, and a 2070 Super Advanced Edition GPU. I’ve seen this very system hit high 120+ frames on nearly all of the titles I’ve played on it but Metamorphosis suffered from massive frame dips. There were certain open areas where there was too much lighting and my frames dipped to 10-15 which was alarming.
The frame dips made me nervous enough that I had to check the temperatures of my CPU and GPU and turn the PC off to see if my AIO cooler was functioning all right. Everything was working fine so there was no throttling due to overheating and it was just the game. These frame-dips are not too extreme in most parts of the games but in open spaces where there was too much lighting, I was barely touching 20 on the frame rate counter. In certain areas, I also noticed that the feet of the insects were going inside the ground instead of staying on top of it. While this is not much of a hiccup, the frame dips were simply game-breaking at least for me.
Metamorphosis is a brilliant concept and it was an enjoyable experience for me. There is not much to do in the game after beating the story since the game is completely story-focused. Once you are done with the story, you are basically done with the game. This is completely fine because we have seen tons of singleplayer focused titles that are just the main story and then they are done. However, what I really the developers to do is spend a little time and work on the frame-dip problem because it is a big game-breaker and my only major concern with how the game plays on PC.
Final Verdict:
I absolutely loved playing Metamorphosis. For someone who is generally afraid of insects, it was a really pleasant experience playing the game. Playing as a bug and exploring a world occupied by bugs really offers a unique perspective of how you play a game. The visuals are decent are the gameplay is solid with a good enough story. However, when it comes to the performance of the game on PC, I have some serious concerns. The massive frame dips even on a relatively high-end system simply show that the game has not been optimized well. I did a little research online about the frame-dip problem and it appears like I was not the only one experiencing this problem. The game needs some serious performance fixes because it is completely ruining an otherwise excellent game that is definitely worth your time.
Final Score: 7.5/10
