Metamorphoses

by Emily Short profile

Fantasy
2000

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Number of Ratings: 129
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A game with thousands of possible items and many endings, February 3, 2016

I revisited this game after five years. This time I was struck by the enjoyability of playing around with the transformation machines. Nothing is more fun than making an enormous wooden dress and destroying it, or making a spongy key. The total number of possible items you can make it immense.

Emily Short describes on her website that this game was developed in part because she was trying to implement different textures, sizes, etc. to make an extremely customizable game. Thus, like with many of her games, this game tries to push the boundaries of what IF can do, with a story wrapped up around it after the fact.

Other examples of this "new implementation or gameplay technique wrapped up in a story" are Counterfeit Monkey and Galatea. However, for me, story is my first concern with interactive fiction. That's why I love the intricate details of Curses!, Anchorhead, Worlds Apart, Theatre, etc. So this leads to an interesting effect when I play Short's "implementation" games; I have a blast at the time, and then generally forget the game afterwards. Metamorphoses is such a game; it's fun as a tool, but not very memorable as a story. The same is true of "Dreamhold" by Plotkin, which was designed as a tutorial.

As a final note, I love Short's story-heavy games like Glass. Remembering the "smell of blood" ending creeps me out...

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- Guenni (At home), January 24, 2016

- branewurms, January 3, 2016

- Aryore, December 13, 2015

- Sonata Green, September 24, 2015

- chux, May 20, 2015

- blue/green, March 19, 2015

- Thrax, March 11, 2015

- CMG (NYC), November 18, 2014

- Boochuckles (Tampa Bay, Fl), July 31, 2014

- IFforL2 (Chiayi, Taiwan), May 19, 2014

- Naeradan, March 19, 2014

- Lorxus, March 8, 2014

- Egas, August 11, 2013

- DAzebras, April 23, 2013

- ptkw, March 4, 2013

- dk101 (London, UK), March 2, 2013

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Deep and faceted game, December 23, 2012
by Andromache (Hawaii)

This is the second time I played this game. The first time, this database was either not operational or I hadn't discovered it yet. Being one who comes and goes in the interactive fiction community, part of the reason I replayed it was to get back into the mindset of this medium and I remembered I thoroughly enjoyed this game the first time.

Playing again, I have to say I appreciate it more because I'm not as preoccupied with how to solve the puzzles. It's not that the puzzles are hard; they are in fact incredibly intuitive and I didn't need a walkthrough. I even found several solutions to puzzles that I hadn't discovered the first time. There is one guess-the-verb issue and another solution that is somewhat alarming, but I think this is a subjective judgment coming from someone who isn't generally in it for the puzzles. I don't mind puzzles, but they need to be consistent and plausible for the story, and all of these were. They were even fun, because you can be very creative with the paths you take.

However, what really makes this game stand out for me is the symbolism and writing. Knowing more or less the results of actions allowed me to focus more on aesthetics in prose and story, and this game is a good combination of acquiring items and giving those items significance as more than just treasures to take home. They are concrete items with ties to the immaterial, and it's not only the items that undergo changes.

It is tough to talk about the game without spoiling things. But if you like well-intigrated, logical problems that grow out of the world and backstory of your character and get fulfillment from endings (yes, there are multiple ones) that make you think and are what you make of them, I think this is a journey worth taking that is immersive enough to revisit from time to time. I know this one isn't leaving my collection if I can help it.

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- Perry Simm (Vienna, Austria), December 2, 2012

- Sdn (UK), November 6, 2012

- Inarcadia Jones, October 6, 2012

- ProminencePen, August 28, 2012

- kala (Finland), May 26, 2012

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Technically Innovative and Narratively Intriguing, March 27, 2012
by Jim Kaplan (Jim Kaplan has a room called the location. The location of Jim Kaplan is variable.)
Related reviews: emily short, fantasy

Play it if: you have a thing for fairy tales, ancient Greek philosophy, non-linear puzzle-solving, or general weirdness.

Don't play it if: you want truly difficult puzzles or a backstory that completely wins your heart.

Metamorphoses has many of the traits I like the most about Emily Short's best work: a fascination with the past, a fairy-tale atmosphere, and innovative game mechanics - traits which can be found to various extents in works like Galatea, Savoir-Faire, and Bronze.

In this game, it is the mechanics which come to the foreground, with your ability to resize objects as well as change their chemical composition. It's absurdly tempting to lose sight of the game altogether and just spend time looking for different configurations you can achieve with random objects in the setting.

True to form, the puzzles in this story have multiple solutions - courtesy of the above-mentioned game mechanics - and while this substantially reduces the overall difficulty of the game in some ways, it in no way detracts from the fun. In fact, a couple of puzzles may even be harder, since you are forced to consider the uses of not only the normal objects in your inventory, but also the potential objects. In this sense the game is nothing short of mind-expanding in terms of how interactive fiction can model worlds.

The rest of the game, while solid, is more textbook. As you solve puzzles you learn more and more of the protagonist's backstory and understand something of her role in this world. It's good stuff and quite intriguing, but by itself it won't really hook you or haunt you afterwards. Which is fine - a game can't be everything at once - but it does mean that you'll be more likely to find the game itself impressive than the story.

Nevertheless, this is a work that is definitely worth your time: a quirky setting, an interesting story, fun non-linear puzzles, and most of all some fascinating game mechanics.

P.S. Personally, I was curious as to whether or not living objects could be modified. Shame that I couldn't find an animal or something to try it out on...

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- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), January 5, 2012


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