REVIEW · 2020-08-12
Metamorphosis
À hauteur d'insecte, un bureau devient un terrain
First Impressions
Steam reads Very Positive: 558 of 653 reviews are positive, 85% (snapshot 2026-09-20, all languages, all purchase types). The store page itself shows 83% of 467. On the numbers alone it looks like a quiet, tidy little thing.
Read the text, though, and something odd shows up. The positive and negative sides agree completely on one point. The puzzles are thin. Both camps say so.
The vote still splits. What splits is not the verdict on quality. It is whether the thing at the centre of this game counts as a mechanic at all.
I read the top 16 helpful reviews and 10 recent ones, 26 in total. What I looked at is the review pool, not the board.
Metamorphosis key art as shown on the Steam store page — Steam store key art
The World
Almost every design decision here folds into one. The protagonist gets small. The world does not change at all. Kafka's morning simply continues at insect height.
The positive vocabulary clusters right there: a tiny world that feels huge, a viewpoint nobody has offered before, scenery modelled with unusual care. A desktop, a bottle mouth, a gap between floorboards all stand up as terrain.
In my own terms this is a change of observation resolution. Nothing new was placed in the room. The same room is handed back to be read at another scale.
The change happens once, though. Within the first half hour you have learned to read a large world as small terrain. There is no second lesson after that.
Metamorphosis in play — image 1 as listed on the Steam store page (Steam store screenshot)
Putting the Mechanics into Words
The negative vocabulary clusters just as tightly: walking simulator, crawling simulator, Roomba. And: there are no puzzles.
What interests me is that the same observation sits inside the recommendations. The puzzle design is a little disappointing. It leans mostly on parkour. The puzzles are too easy. Every one of those lines was written with a thumbs up attached.
Count the verbs and the reason becomes plain. Walk, climb, carry, stick to a sticky surface. That is roughly the list. This is not scarcity arrived at by subtraction; it was scarce from the start.
Scale is a state, not a verb — that is how I read it. Superliminal used perspective tricks as a mechanic and put the seeing itself in the player's hands. This game fixes the seeing on the set-dressing side.
Metamorphosis in play — image 2 as listed on the Steam store page (Steam store screenshot)
Place in the Lineage
One reviewer reached back to Bad Mojo from 1996, the game where you cross a kitchen as a cockroach. The same idea, they noted, was tried nearly thirty years ago.
Games that deal in scale seem to come in two kinds. Either scale is handed to the player, or it is fixed on the world's side.
Superliminal took the first road. Pick an object up, set it down elsewhere, and its size changes. Scale became a verb there.
This game took the second. Gregor's size is decided by the story, and the player moves around inside a settled scale. The shape of the split vote reflects exactly what that choice costs.
Metamorphosis in play — image 3 as listed on the Steam store page (Steam store screenshot)
Pacing
On length the negative reviews turn suddenly precise. Two and a half hours for twenty-five dollars. Three hours and basically no puzzles. Time and price always arrive together.
The positive side logs 9.7 hours, 10.3 hours, 15.8 hours — people replaying chapters for the other endings. That a first run takes three to four hours is not disputed by anybody.
For a design with one lesson in it, three hours strikes me as the right length. The shortness reads less like corner-cutting than like a learning curve that finishes early.
The price moved too. The store now shows $4.99, eighty percent off a $24.99 list. Eight of the ten recent reviews are positive, and the shortness is stated as a fact without anger. Some of the original complaint was aimed at the price tag, not the design.
Metamorphosis in play — image 4 as listed on the Steam store page (Steam store screenshot)
Reviews Consulted
This piece was written from the Steam review pool as it stood on 2026-09-20. No review text is quoted directly; recurring claims are reconstructed.
・Steam: Metamorphosis (Very Positive; 558 of 653 reviews across all languages and purchase types = 85%, with the store page showing 83% of 467)
・Read via WebFetch: the top 16 helpful reviews, positive and negative, plus 10 recent ones — 26 in total
・Developer, publisher, release date, description and current price come from the Steam store page and the official API. The comparison to Bad Mojo (1996) was made by a reviewer and is treated here as their observation.
・Images use URLs returned verbatim by Steam's official API. This session could not open the image files themselves, so the captions and alt text describe no content and give only the order in which the images are listed.
Closing
Before the score, one thing needs separating out. At the top of the negative pile sit reports of a progression-breaking bug around the midpoint. That is not a question of design range; it is a straightforward fault, reported by several players and, by their account, unanswered.
Set that aside and what remains is range. For someone who values walking a desktop as terrain, three hours works well. For someone who came to buy the resistance of a puzzle, there is nothing here to hand over.
I give it 6.8. Lower than Steam's 85%, because the scale idea fires once and no second lesson follows. Next to Lumino City, where the material itself keeps generating mechanisms, that single shot looks like a waste.
Even so, it stands as a record that a whole game can be raised on observation resolution alone. Among works built on environmental observation, this is the plainest and most legible example.
Metamorphosis in play — image 5 as listed on the Steam store page (Steam store screenshot)
Where are you with this game?
Press one and the game goes on your shelf. You can see it on your account page.
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