It’s no marketing secret that releasing a demo for your game is one of the best ways to get more attention to your upcoming title. This is especially true when you are creating a game with a niche concept. It’s a good thing that Ovid Works and All In! Games decided to take the demo approach with their soon-to-release title Metamorphosis because this strange concept is a game that is showing big promise.
Gameplay
The short demo only contains three different rooms and show the gradual decrease in size of our protagonist. In the first room you are a regular human size and are given a small “find the key” problem which is pretty much given to you by a note. This room lets you figure out how to interact with objects in the environment by having you open a drawer, grab the key, and unlock the door - straightforward, I know.
In the second room you are slightly smaller and start working with the environment to understand how to get around more creatively while finding what you need. After using the hint and getting the barrings for this room, you will manage to find the key and then make your way up to the door handle to unlock it before progressing into the next room.
In between this room and the final room for the demo, you will get turned full into a bug and get your first control handling of using your multiple legs verses the standard movement. This is where you truly see how this game differs from your typical environment-based puzzle games.
Once in the final room you find yourself facing the biggest challenge of the demo and what will likely be the type of gameplay we will see featured throughout this game. After coming out from a very high up location, you will be challenged to make your way down to the desk without falling and while doing parkour-style movements. Once on the desk, you will walk through some honey-like substance and start walking on the walls to get to the higher sections of the desk. Once you finally reach the note, you find yourself at the end of the demo and falling through space.
Expectations
I imagine that this game is going to be full of parkour-style segments where we will have to get through areas on construed wiring or sticks without falling in order to progress. This could easily be applied to chase sequence challenges and trying to keep up with eavesdropping segments, seeing as how this game has shown the story to be a mystery-based one to solve how we became a bug and how we can revert back to our human selves.
I wasn’t expecting the walking on walls thing to be based on finding a sticky substance since bugs walk up walls all the time, but perhaps that is just a gradual way to introduce us to the concept. Whether we will always need to find a sticky substance first or not, I expect to be finding myself climbing walls and intricate sections almost as much as I will be going through difficult parkour-style segments.
Hopefully, we will also see some more puzzles. They did repeat the whole “find-the-key” thing in the demo, but I am looking forward to there being riddles and hints that take us through challenges to reach key puzzle pieces.
Conclusion
Metamorphosis has a somewhat simplistic demo, but it does a great job of showing off the oddity that is this game’s story and gameplay. I am still really looking forward to this game and playing this short sample of what this game will be like only has me more interested in what the full game will hold!
