This review contains spoilers
I had a passive interest in the game because I generally look for interesting indie titles, but a friend of mine really encouraged me to jump into playing it, and I'm extremely happy I did because the game managed to speak out to a lot of my current interest and feelings I've been working through. As far as a time and place goes, there's no better time for me to get into this game than now. If I'm going to preface my thoughts on this game with anything, it's that every single part of it works in tandem for a beautifully constructed narrative whole. It's a game propelled by nostalgia and influence and exceeds its inspiration in unforgettable ways.
Aesthetically, it's striking, bold, with dozens of little details that you can never fully focus on all contributing to a deep sense of entropy and an uncertain undertone that things are wrong. Cold, sterile, robotic, oppressive underneath the weight of an authoritarian, fascistic government. The surface of the aesthetics start to peel away the further you descend into the game. Beauty and warmth, a desire to live and share, think for oneself and be happy. As these bursts of light and love and life unfold out, the morbid decay, mutations, anguish and incomprehensible memories all boil up into the surface; of your thoughts as the player character, and in the environment itself.
Metamorphosis takes hold of the game and works carefully and selectively with every beat, every level, every person you talk to. Evocatively expressed through to Lovecraftian imagery of the King in Yellow among other less explicit inspirations. Even the little failures and close encounters you have with some of the tougher enemies will push out this intended emotional state the game is trying to carry you through. You lose more of yourself, the facility loses more of itself as you descend deeper, a rotten, amorphous meat pulling into itself, whispering about promises and unity.
It really does an amazing job with keeping the gameplay loops interesting.. You really need to rely on understanding and memorizing your surroundings, constantly rummaging through your limited inventory to make space, head back to storage, coming in and out of the same areas so many times, you would think you'd memorize it all like the back of your hand. Only a true understanding and comfort is just barely out of reach as the ever present rot will force change, take away your map, take away your sense of safety, bring enemies back in places you thought were safe. The walls constantly closing in around you.
You're a person, some kind of bio-android, essentially. As are basically everybody in the facility. When I first was in the game I felt compelled to talk to people, finally some kind of comfort and familiarity to cut through the oppressive atmosphere, only they themselves give haunting images of what's probably going to happen to you. Minds unwound, bodies mutilated, and of course lots of dead bodies in general. At the beginning you know you're looking for someone but don't emotionally understand why, and your interactions with other NPCs and the messages they leave behind do a fantastic job to lay out the emotional urgency of the players mission. I wasn't just playing the game to beat it, I remembered my purpose and had no choice but to push on through insurmountable terror.
This is past the point of no return on spoilers. If this sounds interesting at all and you haven't played it, stop reading.
Throughout the game are a lot of bleeding memories from lives that came before the bio-androids. They're based on the neural patterns of people who'd died out at war. Anything that could provoke them to remember, a la PTSD triggers cause them to go defective. A great deal of the Replikas you see are all so defective, breaking out of the mold of their standard programming to a tragic ending generally, and come to find that you yourself are just like them. Love and desperation for your partner, a human you were built to serve, but it's just a narrative, an encoded assignment mapped onto something which shouldn't have been altered.
At many critical points in the game, you're given a bit of insight into the emotions of Elster, the Replika player character. Obscure, at first, quiet, subdued. Like you experience that bleed firsthand, images of your lover appearing in memories, in dreams. The things she said at first fragmented and split apart. The More you embrace the rot and meat of the game, the more you feel yourself taken into that place, where you can be one with her, where you can remember, where the pointless suffering boils away, and all that's left is the connection, and an embrace of death.
When I finally got through the end of the game, saw the rot and the bleeding of personae reaching a fever pitch as everything internal and external was a borderline amorphous flow of consciousness, data, blood, meat, technology, and different selves. After a whole false ending where that final goal is more clear in my head. Making my way back to the ship to see her in her cryo chamber, reading the notes she and Elster had left behind on their long voyage, the game would've been too agonizing for me to continue if it wasn't the very end.
They're two defects sent off on a mission to colonize a planet that they would never find before the life supports on their ship would give away, and face a slow agonizing death they'd know was coming. Throughout all of those years together, they'd at least have each other, an excruciating but free love where the facades would've melted, their authentic selves known to each other in a universe where it was systematically denied. Until that slow death would come. 3000 cycles. 8.21 years. When the ship gives out. Forced into cryostasis and in a state of liminal, denied death, denied life. The little autonomous existence coming to a close, the ship crashing into the planet the game starts in. When the game ends, you see here again, and aren't even given the dignity of dying in each others arms. Next to each other, fading away and sublimating into the promised oneness of death.
It's a deeply tragic game. I think I'm going to be having a really hard time getting through it in a second playthrough. The more cycles I go through, the more the setting and world building of the game really starts to sink in how much tragedy in the game there is, that you're just one person this is happening to. You find lots of dead Replikas in that facility. You see Adler struggling and reliving the same pain, over and over again, never given peace, never given any kind of closure or sense of understanding. He's trying to keep people out, with purpose. The more I think about him, the more sense he makes as a character. Isa, she fails in her mission too. Just like us. There's an inevitability of failure. Sometimes you can try your hardest, and it still will never be good enough.
This is fresh off of one single playthrough.. I have a lot more feelings going on that I'm having a lot of trouble parsing, mostly because a lot of the imagery and elements in the game are abstract, serving an emotional narrative more than they're trying to serve any kind of rigid plot structure.. And I love this. I love it a lot. That it's obscure in a literal way, and I can map my emotions so easily onto what's happening.. In this way, you could say my interpretations of the game are completely wrong, but it's it exactly like how a defective Replika regaining memories from other past selves would be thinking and perceiving the world? There's an unforgettable beauty in how it's all crafted together.
Also.. two girls kissing
Aesthetically, it's striking, bold, with dozens of little details that you can never fully focus on all contributing to a deep sense of entropy and an uncertain undertone that things are wrong. Cold, sterile, robotic, oppressive underneath the weight of an authoritarian, fascistic government. The surface of the aesthetics start to peel away the further you descend into the game. Beauty and warmth, a desire to live and share, think for oneself and be happy. As these bursts of light and love and life unfold out, the morbid decay, mutations, anguish and incomprehensible memories all boil up into the surface; of your thoughts as the player character, and in the environment itself.
Metamorphosis takes hold of the game and works carefully and selectively with every beat, every level, every person you talk to. Evocatively expressed through to Lovecraftian imagery of the King in Yellow among other less explicit inspirations. Even the little failures and close encounters you have with some of the tougher enemies will push out this intended emotional state the game is trying to carry you through. You lose more of yourself, the facility loses more of itself as you descend deeper, a rotten, amorphous meat pulling into itself, whispering about promises and unity.
It really does an amazing job with keeping the gameplay loops interesting.. You really need to rely on understanding and memorizing your surroundings, constantly rummaging through your limited inventory to make space, head back to storage, coming in and out of the same areas so many times, you would think you'd memorize it all like the back of your hand. Only a true understanding and comfort is just barely out of reach as the ever present rot will force change, take away your map, take away your sense of safety, bring enemies back in places you thought were safe. The walls constantly closing in around you.
You're a person, some kind of bio-android, essentially. As are basically everybody in the facility. When I first was in the game I felt compelled to talk to people, finally some kind of comfort and familiarity to cut through the oppressive atmosphere, only they themselves give haunting images of what's probably going to happen to you. Minds unwound, bodies mutilated, and of course lots of dead bodies in general. At the beginning you know you're looking for someone but don't emotionally understand why, and your interactions with other NPCs and the messages they leave behind do a fantastic job to lay out the emotional urgency of the players mission. I wasn't just playing the game to beat it, I remembered my purpose and had no choice but to push on through insurmountable terror.
This is past the point of no return on spoilers. If this sounds interesting at all and you haven't played it, stop reading.
Throughout the game are a lot of bleeding memories from lives that came before the bio-androids. They're based on the neural patterns of people who'd died out at war. Anything that could provoke them to remember, a la PTSD triggers cause them to go defective. A great deal of the Replikas you see are all so defective, breaking out of the mold of their standard programming to a tragic ending generally, and come to find that you yourself are just like them. Love and desperation for your partner, a human you were built to serve, but it's just a narrative, an encoded assignment mapped onto something which shouldn't have been altered.
At many critical points in the game, you're given a bit of insight into the emotions of Elster, the Replika player character. Obscure, at first, quiet, subdued. Like you experience that bleed firsthand, images of your lover appearing in memories, in dreams. The things she said at first fragmented and split apart. The More you embrace the rot and meat of the game, the more you feel yourself taken into that place, where you can be one with her, where you can remember, where the pointless suffering boils away, and all that's left is the connection, and an embrace of death.
When I finally got through the end of the game, saw the rot and the bleeding of personae reaching a fever pitch as everything internal and external was a borderline amorphous flow of consciousness, data, blood, meat, technology, and different selves. After a whole false ending where that final goal is more clear in my head. Making my way back to the ship to see her in her cryo chamber, reading the notes she and Elster had left behind on their long voyage, the game would've been too agonizing for me to continue if it wasn't the very end.
They're two defects sent off on a mission to colonize a planet that they would never find before the life supports on their ship would give away, and face a slow agonizing death they'd know was coming. Throughout all of those years together, they'd at least have each other, an excruciating but free love where the facades would've melted, their authentic selves known to each other in a universe where it was systematically denied. Until that slow death would come. 3000 cycles. 8.21 years. When the ship gives out. Forced into cryostasis and in a state of liminal, denied death, denied life. The little autonomous existence coming to a close, the ship crashing into the planet the game starts in. When the game ends, you see here again, and aren't even given the dignity of dying in each others arms. Next to each other, fading away and sublimating into the promised oneness of death.
It's a deeply tragic game. I think I'm going to be having a really hard time getting through it in a second playthrough. The more cycles I go through, the more the setting and world building of the game really starts to sink in how much tragedy in the game there is, that you're just one person this is happening to. You find lots of dead Replikas in that facility. You see Adler struggling and reliving the same pain, over and over again, never given peace, never given any kind of closure or sense of understanding. He's trying to keep people out, with purpose. The more I think about him, the more sense he makes as a character. Isa, she fails in her mission too. Just like us. There's an inevitability of failure. Sometimes you can try your hardest, and it still will never be good enough.
This is fresh off of one single playthrough.. I have a lot more feelings going on that I'm having a lot of trouble parsing, mostly because a lot of the imagery and elements in the game are abstract, serving an emotional narrative more than they're trying to serve any kind of rigid plot structure.. And I love this. I love it a lot. That it's obscure in a literal way, and I can map my emotions so easily onto what's happening.. In this way, you could say my interpretations of the game are completely wrong, but it's it exactly like how a defective Replika regaining memories from other past selves would be thinking and perceiving the world? There's an unforgettable beauty in how it's all crafted together.
Also.. two girls kissing