Metamorphosis (PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC)

by Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to wake up one day “transformed into a hideous vermin” just like your literary hero Gregor Samsa? Do I ever have a game for you: Ovid Works’ Metamorphosis (Get it? It’s not just Kafka, it’s also Ovid’s Metamorphosis…). Just like Gregor, one day you were not a bug, but the next day: total arthropod. However, unlike Gregor, you actually have an opportunity to regain your sweet bipedal form. If you can get a job with Tower, they have a re-humanization program available for their star employees! Along the way, you might even get a chance to save your friend Josef from his inexplicable arrest (a nod to Kafka’s novel The Trial). Of course, if you want to work for Tower, you’re going to need to get a certificate first…

Metamorphosis is a three-dimensional platformer that sets itself apart from other games in the genre by combining first-person perspective with the ability to see the whole room from above. This perspective adds sometimes significant technical difficulty to the game, while emphasizing the unique sense of scale you get from, well, being a bug (think existentialist Chibi-Robo!). Relative to Gregor’s slapstick, QWOP-style attempts at movement in Kafka’s book, your shiny new carapace is the Ferrari of exoskeletons. You skitter, leap, and sometimes even climb the walls as you navigate your way from the guts of Josef’s desk through some truly Kafkaesque hellscapes.

Rather than straightforwardly adapting Kafka’s novella into a game, Metamorphosis gathers a handful of Kafka’s stories into a filing-cabinet fever dream that builds a queasy fantasy out of lurking dust and moldering stacks of paper. A simple office drawer might be a portal to the Gaping Maw of Paper Hell, where you watch precious certificate after precious certificate magically fly just past your grasp. The game is also predictably loaded with little treats for those who, like me, forget that they are playing the game for fun. You might crawl across Josef’s copy of Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky, or scuttle past a meticulously cut-out portrait of a woman holding a muff. In the end, all it takes is a few hours of bug parkour to remind you how life is about the journey, not the destination—the journey from one form and place to another form and place to another…wait, what was the destination again?