[Review] Metamorphosis - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: Ovid Works
Published By: All In! Games
Categories: Adventure, First Person
Release Date: 08.12.20

You wake up after a long night of partying with a strongest of hangovers, slowly you realize rooms are full of giant furniture. Then it hits you, you’ve turned into a bug, more specifically, an Ant. You go to find your roommate, only to find him accosted by the police with no explanation given. You head on a quest to become human once again while your roommate attempts to figure out the reason for his looming arrest. This is the basis for Metamorphosis. How Kafka-Esqe.

Being an ant, everything you’d see in day to day life is much bigger. Very similar to the Army Men games or an Wii game named Deadly Creatures. A couch or even park of a desk are like mountains to you, a steriogram becomes a nightclub, a desk to process paperwork becomes somewhat of a factory. I love the creativity of normal objects becoming something new to a smaller creature, much like in the Pikmin and recent Paper Mario games. About 50% of the environments are like this. The other half is usually in caves deep in walls or desks, dreamlike areas with floating objects. While the backgrounds for these areas are drastically less interesting, real life objects like a table fan to even a mail sorter are obstacles with puzzles needing to be solved. Design wise, I like how the game looks, but the actual graphics leave very much to be desired, but the actual graphics leave much to be desired. The models range from looking good on objects to quite off on people. Bugs look rightfully detailed however. On the outside, you overhear your roommate speaking with other people. On the inside or even under objects, you’ll find other ants doing day to day tasks. The conversations by the humans sound normal, but with bugs, conversations are often a bit silly, and occasionally pun ridden. Another interesting difference is that while the game is fully voice acted, for the bugs, it’s a bit jumbled up, like Animal Crossing speak or the ghost voices in killer7, which is a nice little touch.

Metamorphosis is a first person adventure/platformer, hich can be a bit of an issue to some people. At times, due to the first person view, it might be a tad disorientating to maneuver in some places, especially when climbing walls. To add to that, as an ant, you as well as the camera, are very close to the ground, which can make jumping to places feel a tad funny. Majority of what you’ll be doing is running, jumping, and climbing, so you will get used to it rather quickly fortunately. One issue I had on the gameplay front is interacting with the other ants. The game has a little pointer to interact with things in the center of the screen, to talk to other ants, it needs to be right on them in a certain way. This was never a big issue, but it is a bit of an inconvenience and I just assumed an ant wasn’t one to talk to because it wasn’t on just right. Otherwise, I never got lost in the game and simply pressing the A button zooms the camera out, shows you points of interest, and tells you your objective.

Outside of a desire for there to be more to the game than moving around and some personal complains on graphics, I liked Metamorphosis. I’d love to see the developers have another crack at a bug focused game, maybe a flight-centric game as a fly.