Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis is a short survival horror adventure developed for the Halloween 2021 event about Dai Jiang, a young woman that is travelling on a boat where she works as member of the staff. On the boat there are some uirky travellers that she gets to know, a french doctor, a russian colonel and an adventurer...
ok so all goes well until their ship shipwrecks and the protagonists find themselves stranded on a desert island.

But...
Yes, as you can guess, the place isn't empty, there's an abandoned american military building. And there is still someone lurking in the shadows... dun dun dun duuuuun!

This is the plot of Matemorphosis, a survival horror of exploration, chases and... dialogues! The game is short, divided into three parts: the ship and the island, the first building and the second building and end part... there is no combat, just lookig for items necessary to progress (and healing herbs!) and chase sequences (the opposition seems to be unbeatable, but uhm ok)!


Let's Split Up, Gang! Yeah, yeah awesome idea, especially in a horror adventure!

Graphically this game is peculiar: besides the original portraits (that have minimal variations due to some circumstance, do not expect lots of expressions and lots of portraits!) the graphics used for assets and charsets reminds to me of the old Pokemon Gold game, even if of course in this case we are talking about a horror, so expect dark rooms, reduced visuals due to light sources and bloody deails (but nothing visually extreme, mind that, it's just a handful of pixels!)
Maps are simple, like the graphics used, but well done, there are lots of optional interactions and boks and diaries that tells the story and you may or may not read. If you can, do that because otherwise you will miss some informations and also some amusing dialogues (like "A book written by Lovecraft? Never heard of him!").
Music is perfectly reserved for some tense moment and it enhances the sense of danger and isolation of this creepy game.

Don't expect puzzles or anything complex, all items that can be collected are needed to progress the story, except the medical herbs that heal one hit point (out of a total of five that Dai Jiang possess) but are more than enough to finish the game. You can also save enywhere but do not worry that the game invite you to save before starting a dangerous part (I died 2-3 times but it's pretty easy! I just was cornered in the final section, enemies are quite fast, unlike the slow zombies we all know!). Maybe the problem is that Dai Jiang isn't very fast or cannot run, and instead enemies are quick, especially one at a certain point that will sprint, anyway it's totally possible to finish the game despite these observations.

Then the story: it's pretty good even if there are a couple of parts: the beginning where there is are so many dialogues that I found it excessive and a bit boring, considering the rest of the game. And the ending, that's rather abrupt and I admit I expected a bit more. Also... why did the shipwreck happened? No one will ever know! But this is just one of the things left unexplained, anyway it's common in horror stories, isn't it?


Who? Me? But of course, they could not stop me! And I had to finish this review...

The Final Verdict
Metamorphosis is a very good game, especially because it was done in a restricted time for the Halloween event. Maybe I'd have liked to have the protagonist walks slightly quicker (but she has no slow walking speed at all! And this makes the chases more challenging) I liked the story, setting (even if it is just slightly outlined) and music, graphics, the dialogues are well done, I gueas I just saw a couple of typos, but nothing much and for the rest no bugs.

I had an issue that made the game crash during the shipwreck: The accents of the Chipsets that did not load the maps properly and also the lightning effects (solved by renaming the files and fixing the database/events). I don't know if it was due the language of my PC (that changed the accented letters to japanese characters, since I have them enable to use them in other Rmk games!).

I liked this game, was interesting and well done, I played it from the beginning to the end without stopping, pity for those small defects I encountered, but for me considered it's en event game, it's a solid 3.5, no wait 3.8/5.