Metamorphosis Is The Parkour Bug Game Based On A Kafka Novel You’ve Been Waiting For

Metamorphosis’ mystifying surrealism is what makes it such a profound story, but I never imagined Kafka’s work could ever be remade as a video game.

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Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella Metamorphosis is one of the most confounding works of modern fiction. It has been endlessly analyzed and explored through every critical lens imaginable, yet it has remained a literary black box: its meaning is completely open to interpretation, and its themes are as relevant today as they have ever been. Metamorphosis’ mystifying surrealism is what makes it such a profound short story, but I never imagined Kafka’s best-known work could ever be remade as a video game.

The developers describe Metamorphosis is a story “inspired by Kafka’s imagination” and, though it shares a title and inciting incident with Kafka’s novella, the game tells a completely original, yet wonderfully bizarre story. While it’s impossible to approach a game like Metamorphosis with any sort of expectation, I still came away from my demo impressed, intrigued, and excited to see more.

A Bug’s Life

The Gregor Sansa of Kafka’s book and Ovid Works’ game both wake up one morning to discover they’ve been transformed into an insect, but that’s pretty much where any narrative similarity between the two stories ends. While Kafka’s Gregor sees his life and relationships quickly fall apart until he eventually dies of uselessness, Ovid Work’s Gregor’s transformation is a call to action that ultimately places him on the path of adventure and intrigue.

Gregor is an insect-sized insect (another departure from the novella) which immediately brings the entire game under the purview of one of my absolute favorite tropes: The Incredible Shrinking Man. I don’t know what it was about 90’s children entertainment, but there was an entire category of media back then dedicated to tiny characters in a normal-sized world. Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Toy Story, the Army Men games, the best Half-Life Deathmatch map of all time RATS… the list goes on and on. Between Metamorphosis and Obsidian’s upcoming survival/crafting game Grounded we might be in the midst of an Incredible Shrinking Man renaissance, but I digress.

The point is, navigating normal spaces becomes instantly exciting when you’re miniaturized. A magazine can be a ramp, a pencil can be a bridge, and climbing to the top of a 4ft dresser can be a thrilling challenge. Platforming up and over furniture and exploring everyday environments from a new perspective is the basic gameplay loop of Metamorphosis, and it feels fantastic.

More Legs = Better Parkour

The locomotion in Metamorphosis has absurdly fun. The combination of movement speed, jump height, and a low-profile POV gives such a great sense of speed and momentum. You can effortlessly mantle over slight elevation shifts and launch yourself across wide gaps without ever slowing down. It’s sort of a useless sentiment, but the game does a fantastic job of making you feel like a bug, and the locomotion is just the start.

You can see your front two legs underneath you and they animate individually and organically based on your movement. They can rest on top of and sort of curl around irregular objects, and when you rotate they shift around and even cross over each other.

What’s more, the sound of all your legs moving together across different surfaces is as immersive as it is off-putting. They plink across glass and squish through moldy pipes with the same rapid, rhythmic little impacts. It’s making my skin crawl just thinking about it. Metamorphosis does a great job of making you disgusted with yourself, which motivates you on your mission to transform back to normal.

Gregor’s Bizzare Adventure

I felt like I was practicing a speedrun during my time with Metamorphosis. Not only because it’s so much fun to move fast, but also because of the urgency with which Gregor would very much like to transform back into a person, as well as a plotline I haven’t describe yet that involves Gregor’s friend Joseph is being detained by a pair of strange men that are pretending to be the police. The combination of all these elements (as well as the apparent lack of hidden collectibles) made me want to tear through each level at breakneck speed.

Gregor is being driven towards a mysterious tower where he is told he will be given a new job and, if he performs well, will eventually earn back his human body. Along the way, there are other insects to meet and puzzles to solve while scenes between Joseph and his captors play out in the background. It’s a totally unique way to tell the story and I can’t wait to keep playing.

Metamorphosis sets a surreal town almost instantly that is both strange and fanciful but not quite horror, despite the horrific notion of being transformed into a bug. It’s more Alice in Wonderland than The Fly, and the surrealism ensures that the next moment is always something unexpected. I’ve never played a game like Metamorphosis and I fully expect it to be a short, one-and-done kind of experience, but an experience I’m very much looking forward to.

Check out Metamorphosis when it releases on Steam later this year.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/metamorphosis-speedy-parkour-kafka-novel-game/