Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis finds its main character, Gregor Samsa, waking up one morning, suddenly and inexplicably transformed into a giant insect. It’s an utterly bizarre premise for a novel that evolves into a tragic story, but as the inspiration for developer Ovid Works’ Metamorphosis, Gregor’s transformation provides an opportunity to explore a strange idea, the surreal world it spawns, and the peculiar creatures who inhabit it.
I went hands-on with the first hour or so of Metamorphosis, which runs with Kafka’s idea of transforming into a bug and only seems to get weirder from there. While Gregor wakes up to find himself in a bug body in the novel, the game’s Gregor wakes up at his friend Josef’s house after a night of drunken celebration. Vaguely hungover, Gregor starts to head out for work, only to find that as he travels the house and through doors, the world transforms around him. He walks through a door to find himself in a larger version of the room he just left–or in a shrunken state. And before long, he’s scrambling around on six spindly legs, with his internal monologue transforming from human speech to insectile chittering.
The whole situation has a very Alice in Wonderland feel as you explore a surreal world whose rules don’t seem particularly rigid. Gregor’s first task as a human is to open drawers around the bedroom he awakes in to find the key to the door, and you repeat that same task as a bug. It’s a pretty good early indication of how Metamorphosis seems like it’ll play out: Metamorphosis is an exploration game about finding ways to traverse its environment and solving puzzles about how to venture from one area to the next. Since you’re an insect, a lot of the solutions you have to find about how to get where you’re going in an oversized world have to be fairly novel.