Ovid Works took a 20th-century classic and translated it into a video game. That is an amazing achievement, dare I say even a bold one. They did some clever work on controls and how being a bug would translate to gameplay, and they did it mostly well. They translated a classic story into a fascinating, somewhat frightening at times powerful message. The lack of direction at times and the buggy (yep) controls tend to disrupt the flow of the above, but the majority of what they did isn’t lost because of it.
Do you think Franz Kafka would have imagined his work, The Metamorphosis, turned into a video game? I think he might have been impressed with the translation.
Ovid Works released its Metamorphosis at the beginning of August and it’s a game named and based after Franz Kafka’s short story. The story follows a man named Gregor who wakes up to find himself turned into a vermin/insect. The game carries the same plot and subtext as the short story, with a little bit of authoritarianism and socialism points of view sprinkled into it. On the surface lies a mixture of horror and humor with a large amount of puzzle-solving built into its design.
Metamorphosis, like the story, starts out with Gregor waking up from a bender and feeling a bit ‘off’. The off part is that he is changing ever so slowly. The game takes you through several rooms before revealing that Gregor is in fact an insect. The story introduces an organization called Tower that hires insects to work for them, make great pay, and provides a promise of the human form at the end of the insect’s tenure with Tower. That doesn’t sound sinister at all, right?
From there, the game just puts you through the ropes of strange puzzles and low amounts of player agency, which can be absolutely restrictive. For example, the first room you encounter is a jumbled mess of a place, where furniture is broken and floating, while chairs lay tangled and broken. The chairs are the pathway to the next part of the story, which acts as a tutorial on how to live life as a bug. Knowing angles, crawling, and sticking to legs and walls, there’s a lot of unique controls to get used to in this room before the real story shows its face. The game’s control difficulty never plateaus and the lack of linear-ness from the low player agency tends to make the gameplay a constant uphill struggle of uncertainty on how and if you can go certain places and directions (we’ll get to that in a bit). Getting back to controls, to Ovid’s credit, probably being a bug is as loosey-goosey as the controls feel in this game. The thumbsticks work with you about 75-85% of the time, which is fine, especially when the scenery and story are needed distractions from the controls. The comfort level and uncertainty of the controls will make you accidentally over or under compensate when playing the game. I never really reached a comfort level with what Gregor can do. I can’t tell you how many times I feel to my squishy death over and over again. Anyway, the controls aren’t really the problem here, as you can get used to them after an hour or so playing the game. You will make it work.
The bigger issue with this game is player progression. While I am all for player discovery in a game, this one tends to really hide its cards from you at times. This game has a linear narrative structure, as the story seems to be more vital than gameplay, which is fine. That said, knowing where to go next tends to be a constant issue. Generally, when you play a video game, there are onscreen visual cues (some literal, some hidden in plain sight) that give you a hint on where to go. For example, in Horizon Zero Dawn, if you’re climbing up a mountain, you can see bits of white paint thrown on places where you can jump to in order to grab a ledge. In Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, when you’re trying to escape or get into a building, there is usually a yellow tarp thrown over a window seal to indicate that you can go into there or out of there. In Metamorphosis, it’s a hit or miss situation, where you will find some indicators, be it through visuals (like a napkin hanging on a wine bottle) or through verbiage (where the insect tells itself that the ‘thing’ you’re looking for is close), but sometimes that indicator is nowhere to be found, so you aimlessly walk around until you bump into it. If the latter occurs, then you feel lost in the game, which is a place you don’t want to be, especially when you’re trying to unfold the odd story and keep engaged with it.
Let me just say that I’m not implying that the game has to lead you everywhere, but trying to find an object that is sitting on the top of a dresser with no obvious way to visually get to it can be somewhat frustrating. Throwing a bone to the player and not making them feel like there is no way out or making them feel like they might have taken a wrong turn somewhere is not a place you want gameplay design to be. For example, the game, The Witness, where you are just placed on an island and you have to solve puzzles from scratch, gives players a small push in order to get from A to B (usually indicated with wires, shadows, and whatnot). This is a problem with Metamorphosis, where you have to stop and go, sometimes without a cue, just to figure out how to go from A to B. People want to be rewarded for their progression and constant confusing stops just will completely keep players from feeling like they’re making progress. Is this a dealbreaker? It isn’t, but it does hurt the flow of an otherwise fantastic concept and disrupts the flow of the story.
As for the overall body of work, Ovid Works took a 20th-century classic and translated it into a video game. That is an amazing achievement, dare I say even a bold one. They did some clever work on controls and how being a bug would translate to gameplay, and they did it mostly well. They translated a classic story into a fascinating, somewhat frightening at times powerful message. The lack of direction at times and the buggy (yep) controls tend to disrupt the flow of the above, but the majority of what they did isn’t lost because of it.
Still, it’s a bold release that they took a chance on. For the most part, they executed it decently. I wish more developers took on something oddball like this, as it does provide a unique journey that most wouldn’t have dreamed could be translated.
