New studio Black Sun is making Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis a VR game

It's a (self-reflective) bug's life in Metamorphosis VR

Black Sun Productions

There’s a new VR game studio in town called Black Sun Productions, and they’ve announced their ambitious debut project: Metamorphosis VR. Ovid Works first launched Metamorphosis – based on Franz Kafka’s eponymous work – on Steam in 2020 after years of development and several pre-release rewards. Black Sun’s version keeps the basics, but the studio also describes it as a “reinvention.”

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You play as Gregor, a salesman who wakes up one day to find he’s a roach and the police are arresting his friend. The two events are, so it seems, unrelated, but now Gregor-the-Roach has to find out how to help his friend and, hopefully, regain his original form. Despite being a video game adaptation of a book, there’s still a fair bit of Kafka’s philosophy present behind the scenes.

“We chose Metamorphosis as our debut title for Black Sun because its surreal, Kafkaesque world – some of the richest and most immersive environments imagined – offers a perfect opportunity to bring this extraordinary experience to virtual reality,” Corbin Chase, CEO of Black Sun Productions, said in a press statement. 

“One of VR’s most powerful abilities is how it changes our perspective and sense of scale, and Metamorphosis uniquely combines confusion, bewilderment, wonder and beauty. All imparted by that shift in perspective, it feels like this game was always meant for VR.”

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You frequently hear similar statements about most VR games, but judging from the Metamorphosis VR trailer and the original game, it’s an apt thing to say about this one. One feature that made the PC version of Metamorphosis stand out was just how effectively Ovid used the change in player perspective to tell a multilayered story and rewire how you think about interacting with a game world, which is the whole premise of VR entertainment to begin with.

Black Sun will release Metamorphosis for Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3 on October 10, 2024, for $19.99.