Reviews
[Review] ‘Metamorphosis’ Takes Players on a Weird, Kafka-Inspired Trip to Bugtown
Few things in games are as interesting to me as those that take me into the strange and surreal. Games that exploit the strength of the medium by playing with player expectations and presenting genuinely different perspectives.
Metamorphosis, a loose adaptation of the 105-year-old Franz Kafka novella The Metamorphosis, is one such game. Kafka’s story was already bizarre, as a man, Gregor, suddenly becomes a giant insect one day, and ends up trapped in his room by his repulsed family. The game takes a slightly different approach, but imaginatively captures something about the protagonist’s state of mind as he scuttles about the human world in the form of a cockroach.
Created by Ovid Works, Metamorphosis is a first-person puzzle-platformer, largely from the perspective of bug-Gregor. It begins in a more traditional manner however, with human Gregor awakening in his room and soon after, walking through a hallway that is apparently unfamiliar to him. Soon enough, things get weird. The house seems to grow in scale with each room, and in a wonderfully seamless moment, Gregor turns a corner to see fungi on the wallpapered walls transition into a grungy water pipe and voila! Gregor figures it out; he’s become an insect, and he’s strangely nonplussed by this development.
Gregor then clambers about a bit in his new chitinous form, and after reading a note, he falls through the ink on the paper and the opening credits roll. While having less knowledge of what was going to happen would have made this all a touch more impactful, it still manages to be a delightfully strange opening that culminates in Gregor leaping across debris in an inky void. The rest of the game only reinforces this casually odd retelling of a classic novel.
Rather than take the original story of a man being shunned by his family as he ends up resigned to his six-legged fate, Metamorphosis gives Gregor hope of reverting back to human form, but he’ll have to go on an arduous journey full of human threats, simple puzzles, and dizzying leaps in order to find it.
The traversal in Metamorphosis is somewhat reminiscent of the verticality found in games like Mirror’s Edge, Portal 2, or Dying Light. Gregor’s cockroach form means he’s able to clamber up walls and scurry across high up areas such as shelves, pipes, and cabinets in order to avoid the lumbering humans. This is a disorientating task, to begin with, as Gregor’s speed and ability to climb takes time to get used to. Jumps are thankfully not as precision-based as I first feared, but there are still moments it can be rather unwieldy. It doesn’t get that much easier, however.
On the upside, you can zoom out and see the terrain you must cross in order to better plan the best route. It’s a welcome idea as it really helps get your bearings after flipping and turning in all directions.
Climbing and leaping is the meat of Metamorphosis, but there’s a fair bit of interaction with the insect community, including doing jobs to curry favor with them. These bugs range from fairly normal-looking to bipedal, cigarette-smoking smartasses, and seem to function like a human society in a lot of ways. In the space of less than an hour, you’ve gone from being a man walking down a dreary corridor to being a talking bug trying to find a bug lawyer in a bug music club, and it’s to the game’s credit that it handles this transition pretty smoothly. The surreal is best when it’s not force-fed on you, rather gradually and nonchalantly fed to you in morsels.
For such a visually interesting game, it’s a shame the people in Metamorphosis are visually not quite up to the same quality as the insects. While there are bugs with actual personality in their movements and mannerisms, the humans look a bit too ‘man in a rubber suit of a man’, thus causing a bit of a disconnect. They still make for intimidating threats though. Even when they aren’t actively trying to harm you, their sheer size makes for some disturbing moments.
Metamorphosis, much like its source material, doesn’t drag out its story too much, clocking in at around 5 hours, but it does lack the nuance and ambiguity of the novella. There’s little in the way of narrative punch or invention beyond the twisty-turny nature of the game’s world. It’s weird enough that we have a game based on the work of Franz Kafka, but weirder still that it doesn’t utilize the suggestive depth of said work as well as it could.
Maybe the weirdest thing about Metamorphosis is that it takes an old, respected story, and turns it into a dark mirror of the video game adaptation of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. Somehow, despite its issues, that works.
Metamorphosis review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Metamorphosis is out now on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC
Movies
‘Recluse’ Review – Harrowing Haunted House Horror With Lots Of Skeletons In Its Closet [Tribeca 2026]
A haunted house story is tense, terrifying storytelling when it’s properly executed. There’s been a growing tendency in horror to blend together harrowing haunted house stories with traumatic homecomings. A family member’s illness or death triggers a return to something dark that was intentionally left behind. Recluse hits all the tropes that one expects to find in this type of horror film, yet it manages to push this story in a daring, disturbing new direction that uses sound as a superpower.
It’s a unique lens to experience a familiar story about family secrets, generational trauma, unresolved grief, and the importance of not just legacy, but preservation. It’s a hell of a directorial debut from Henry Chaisson that’s guaranteed to get under the audience’s skin as they’re dragged through this painful, toxic tale.
Recluse is a gothic haunted house story where an isolated audio engineer, Joan (Sasha Frolova), returns to her family’s estate to check in on her father after he suffers a terrible accident. Joan suddenly discovers something much more sinister that paints her family’s tragedies in a very different light. Chaisson’s debut functions as a fascinating companion piece to this year’s undertone, which does a lot of the same things.
These two films make for a fascinating case of parallel thinking that tackles comparable subject matter through a similar lens, albeit in a bigger, less claustrophobic story in Recluse’s case. In fact, it’s the perfect horror film for anyone who was let down by undertone and didn’t feel like it brought enough to the table. It’s a considerably more conventional horror film, but this isn’t meant to denigrate its high quality. Recluse may hit some familiar notes, but it’s a scary, well-crafted haunted house horror story that goes for the jugular.
A gripping mystery that involves the tragic, unresolved circumstances that surround Joan’s mother teases a chilling connection to the recent horrors that have afflicted her father. Joan desperately tries to put these pieces together and give her family some sense of grander peace before she’s pulled under and becomes another victim of this festering curse that’s systematically worked its way through the Wyatt family. By doing so, Recluse digs into some deeper commentary on collective trauma, a very literal look at the “sins of the father” adage, and how one selfish decision can ripple through generations and fracture off into different dilemmas. By the end, Recluse has brilliantly flipped the powerful concept of legacy on its head by illustrating the horrors and sense of entitlement that can be born out of this idea.
A legacy is just another name for a curse under the right context.
”Listen” is a simple but powerful command from Joan’s father that she briefly obsesses over. In a way, it becomes Recluse’s grander mission statement, whether it’s in response to Joan listening to the people in her life, the signals that her body and mind are telling her, or the world’s greater whims. It’s important to reconnect with these grounding pillars, especially when it feels like control is slipping away.
Recluse excels with how audio and soundscapes can create entire universes that are full of rich details that transport individuals to these environments. There’s also a level of objectivity when it comes to audio recordings and the evergreen permanence that they’re able to provide. Joan’s career as an audio engineer makes sense for someone who wants to cling to hard evidence and proof of existence. It provides great insight into Joan without ever getting lost in contrived exposition.
Joan’s entire life is built around audio engineering, and so it makes sense that Recluse features excellent sound design that really goes above and beyond with its production elements. All of the sound design is expertly handled and turns the film into something special. These auditory elements intuitively keep the audience on edge so that they’re more susceptible to the actual scares that eventually strike. The smallest sound effect gets turned into a crushing, cacophonous assault. It’s a really effective way to build terror. Writer/Director Chaisson also handles the film’s music, which achieves a sublime, unnerving dissonance that further heightens the free-floating anxiety.
The story at the center of Recluse is slightly generic in some respects, but the film’s visual language and tone make it feel distinctly memorable. It also doesn’t hurt that the home that Joan returns to is basically an eerie art studio that’s full of contorted paintings. Recluse never struggles to generate mounting dread and terror that pump through every scene. Powerful, thoughtful cinematography consistently reinforces the film’s themes. Joan is constantly reflected in different surfaces or viewed through mirrors. She’s also often confined to tight, constricting framing that all speaks to her refracted identity during this moment of loss and her attempts to regain agency and control by making sense of something that’s seemingly unexplainable.
Recluse is full of truly disturbing visuals that make it seem like Joan is lost in a dream that turns out to be an extended nightmare. It’s a surreal journey reminiscent of invasive psychological horror like Silent Hill, with a touch of Sinister and Hereditary thrown in for good measure. There are so many individual frames that could endlessly fuel urban legends and creepypastas.
It does a great job with how it presents Joan’s fragile state of mind, where chilling flashes of the past sneak up on her and unresolved trauma manifests into unsettling imagery. There are endless shots that are obscured in darkness, or shadow is creeping in from the corners of frames like a suffocating force of nature. It’s very rare that a scene is fully lit. It leads to a very lonely, isolating atmosphere that’s easy to get lost in.
Chaisson’s debut stands out from the many other high-minded haunted house horror films without succumbing to the same pretensions that often drag down these stories. It’s a grief-stricken character study that’s full of upsetting visuals that scratch at something visceral and raw. The horror elements connect, and the answers to its grander mystery provide an appropriate and believable sense of closure. Those who are looking for an atmospheric horror film that isn’t afraid to be different while still channeling something real will appreciate Recluse.
Recluse made its world premiere at Tribeca; release info TBD.
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