Metamorphosis VR gets what makes a good VR experience

Even as someone who has played countless VR games by now, I’m still a sucker for jaw-dropping scale. There’s still magic in those moments where I pop on a headset and see a giant boss towering above me or have to climb up a huge cliff. The best VR games, from Astro Bot: Rescue Mission to this year’s excellent Riven remake, all take advantage of that idea to create special experiences that work best in VR.

The developers at Black Sun Productions seem to understand that judging by Metamorphosis VR. The project takes a 2020 game adaptation of Franz Kafka’s classic novel and brings it to the Meta Quest. It’s a strange elevator pitch on paper, but one that made a lot more sense when I got a hands-off preview of the project. Metamorphosis VR uses its first-person bug perspective to play with scale in ways that will make you feel like it was built for VR first, not years later.

Living like a bug ain’t easy

Metamorphosis VR acts as a bit of a deluxe edition of its PC counterpart. It doesn’t just bring the full game to VR, but also includes its two DLC levels. Lots has been tweaked to make it run on a headset (and to reduce motion sickness), but the general flow is the same. It’s an adventure game that has an old school flair to it.

The story follows that of the book while taking some artistic liberties along the way. In it, players turn into a cockroach and are left exploring a house from their shrunken perspective. A stack of chairs becomes a convenient set of platforms. A gramophone becomes a dance club for bugs. There are even surrealist interludes that capture the tone of the text in visually inventive ways, like twisted hallways full of moving portraits.

There are two big changes from seeing all of this in VR instead of on a flat screen. The most important change is the visual scale of it all. The adventure takes place from a first-person perspective, which lets players see household items towering above them. In one sequence, our brave cockroach walks near a full-grown man standing by a table. His hand looks massive as the bug skirts around it. Experiences like that are where VR games set themselves apart from traditional games, and Metamorphosis VR is built on sequences like that.

Watching footage of a VR game is never the best indicator of the final product. On a flat screen, Metamorphosis VR looks a bit ugly, with rough textures and some gaudy UI. But visuals look entirely different when you’re actually in a headset. I’ll save any judgment about how the PC version visually translates until I can fully immerse myself in the world and see it all in context.

The other major change is a reworked locomotion system that utilizes the Quest’s motion controls. In the demo, I could see the roaches spindly legs in front of it as it crawled around. Players will get to replicate them by using running and crawling motions, as well as other movements to crawl on walls and jump. I’ll have to try it for myself to see how well they work, but it’s a fun way to get players in the mind of a bug.

Metamorphosis VR seems like a smart match for the tech. It’s an imaginative project that should benefit from the technology more than its standard PC version did. If I’m going to play a game about turning into a bug, I want to actually feel like that bug. I want to see the world through its eyes and crawl around myself. It looks like I’ll get that experience here.

Metamorphosis VR launches on October 10 for the Meta Quest 2 and 3. Black Sun Productions plans to bring it to other PC headsets at a later date.