This bizarre Franz Kafka game might just be a perfect fit for VR

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 Ovid Works 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.

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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