You can finally play as a cockroach in VR with this Kafka-inspired game

Have you ever read Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis and thought, “I sure want to try being that depressing cockroach”? Well, Metamorphosis VR, a virtual reality port of the 2020 indie game Metamorphosis, can sort of help with that by letting you play as a cockroach.

Metamorphosis VR was developed by Black Sun Productions, a new studio that makes VR versions of 2D games. It’ll be released on Meta Quest 2 and Quest 3 on October 10 for $20.

This indie has a similar premise to Kafka’s most famous work — at least at first. It’s about a salesman named Gregor who wakes up one morning to find he’s been transformed into a cockroach. Unlike the story, where Gregor is a giant cockroach who becomes a burden on his awful family and society, game-Gregor is actual cockroach-sized and has to travel among the world of bugs to save his friend.

This is a platformer where you travel under floorboards and in walls to explore a whole world, but it’s also a philosophical, story-driven game with multiple endings that takes cues from some of Kafka’s other works. The aforementioned friend here is Josef K., the lead of Kafka’s novel The Trial who’s arrested by mysterious, shady government agency men for an unknown crime. So while Metamorphosis VR isn’t (thankfully) a full adaptation of The Metamorphosis, it’s a celebration of the themes in Kafka’s works. You’ll see bugs working in a bland corporate setting and just an indulgence in the absurd.

The visuals look fantastic here. They already did for the original platformer, but now you get to see it all from your own perspective. You even have tiny cockroach legs that peek out at the edges of your view, so you can really feel like you’re skittering around.