There is something that lies in the belly of Metamorphosis that makes me recoil. The surface level concept is easy enough to follow. It is a 2D pixel art horror where you play as a “forsaken nun” who “walks the long road to absolution.” The world you find yourself in in the game’s demo is overbearing, crushing. Initially you find yourself in the depths of a church, and even that is worth questioning – what church has depths? When you come across a device, and what on the offset looks like gothic horror a la Bloodborne becomes perplexingly technological.

This device is, mechanically speaking, your main menu. Booting up this menu, you are met with a voice, in text form, that asks you to speak to it. You type in help, literally, with your real-world keyboard, and it gives you a list of options: inventory, journal, settings, all of them with appropriate descriptions, and then OS, the only bit of detail about this option being “me.” What else could OS be but operating system, and if that’s true, what kind of a world is this?

These questions go unanswered in the demo, because why would they be, but we must press on. Which would be all well and good if pressing on wasn’t such a challenge. Metamorphosis harbours a cruel reality, one where you can die quite quickly and easily, its disgustingly abstract enemies frightening enough to cause you to panic, the purposefully dim lighting causing you to second guess every shadow and precarious jump. Dying puts you right back to where you last saved, which can, of course, be longer ago than you wished it was, and further back to – you can only save at certain points, unless you have some candles to make temporary restore points.

Despite writing for a PC site, I am not particularly good at playing with a keyboard and mouse, and while Metamorphosis is playable on controller, most of the tutorialisation UI is for PC only, forcing me into the old ways as I wasn’t sure which button did what. There are a lot of buttons to keep in mind in this game, making it a touch challenging in a potentially unfair way, though I can forgive this for now, as the atmosphere has won me over.

Metamorphosis doesn’t have a release date just yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam, and maybe check out its demo for yourself, right here.