Metamorphoses

Baf's Guide

You're a slave girl on a mission of sorts for your master, though it's difficult to say what the mission is. The game's world is split between the literal and the figurative, and most of what you accomplish is significant more on the symbolic than on the concrete level. Idealized forms are a key thematic element, and most of the puzzles revolve around the transformation of those forms. The game provides two devices that can transform various objects, and the range and complexity of the transformations handled is impressive--the objects, by and large, behave sensibly in all their various forms. There are lots of puzzle solutions and a wide variety of endings, and the game manages to both tell a story and allow ample freedom in exploration. Beautifully described and impressively thoughtful.

-- Duncan Stevens

>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page

There are puzzles, yes, but almost every puzzle seems to have alternate solutions, and even better, these alternate solutions make perfect sense within the game's magical logic. Moreover, Metamorphoses provides much space for play and experimentation, especially through the use of a couple of devices that can effect startling and fascinating transformations on most of the objects in the game. The potential of these devices is so vast, and their effects implemented so thoroughly, that I could easily have spent the two hour judging period just playing with them and experimenting with the results. In fact, the game is coded so well that for a moment it gave me a flash of that wonderful sense I used to get when I first started playing interactive fiction, the sense that here is a world where anything can happen, and anything I try can elicit a magical, transformative response. Of course, that feeling breaks down quickly and inevitably when something I attempt isn't accounted for, but just for that moment of wonder it gave me, I won't forget Metamorphoses for a very long time.
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Puzzles, Plato and Purification, June 26, 2008
Imagine a puzzle game making strong use of a set of simulationist rules about materials and sizes. Imagine a game set in the only partly material laboratory of a Renaissance magus. And imagine a game where the player character attempts to escape from bondage through spiritual purification.

If you can imagine all of those together, you have imagined Metamorphoses.

It is not just a strange game, it is also a very good game. The writing is impeccable and Short effectively weaves together the PCs current exploits with a more emotionally gripping backstory. The puzzles mostly aren't too hard, and all seem to have multiple solutions. The atmosphere is simply great. And there is also true progression in the story, as the PC purifies herself and finally chooses her own fate.

It is also a short game, and you'll probably play through it in two hours. That does mean that the backstory remains very sketchy, and the story doesn't get the emotional resonance that it might have gotten in a longer game. (I would have liked to see the Master in-game, for instance.) The multiple endings don't really work, since you choose between in your last move and that means that everyone is going to Undo and try out the other ones immediately (right?). And there were one or two details in the setting which I felt didn't really fit into the Universe of Renaissance Platonism.

But all in all, these are insignificant complaints compared to the virtues of the game. If you like puzzles, Plato and purification, you should not give this piece a miss.

Perhaps a candidate for Lojban translation., November 24, 2007
The experimental and physical nature of this game world makes me wonder if it would be an ideal candidate to translate into the artificial predicate-nominative language Lojban. The author has described the game as an experiment in "mimesis" (the representation of nature), and I suspect that the unambiguous root words of Lojban may be well-suited to expressing and interpreting mimesis. A physics model embodied in language seems to need something more object-oriented than English.

That is not to say that the game does not succeed in this already, merely that it revealed fascinating possibilities.

If you had told me that an interesting story could be set in a world of Platonic ideals, I would have wondered how it could be possible. But I feel like this is a world I would be interested in revisiting. It held my imagination. The multiple endings were a loving touch.

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