BIOMORPH

My first hour with BIOMORPH had me doing something I genuinely hadn't done in a metroidvania before: stopping to plan which enemy I wanted to kill next, not because of the loot, but because of the body. The core loop is straightforward - you fight as Harlo, an amnesiac alien with two sentient talking hands and a melee-plus-chips combat loadout, and when you down an enemy you can step onto its remains and assume its form entirely. A charging bull-type lets you smash barricades and clear wide gaps. A floating gas creature keeps you hovering above spike fields. A laser-reflecting Klerek opens paths that Harlo's own toolkit simply can't touch. Rack up enough kills of the same enemy type and you permanently unlock that morph for use anywhere on the map, which is when the backtracking and secret-hunting genuinely open up. The transformation system is where BIOMORPH earns its identity. Up to 21 creature forms are unlockable, and the best moments come from working out which combination of morphs - held across three active slots - solves a given traversal puzzle. The Spyrux's spring-jump, the aquatic Jawfish for waterfall sections, the Oddwing's aerial lightning for specific bosses: each biome introduces new fauna at a pace that keeps things feeling fresh. There is a caveat the game earns criticism for, and it's worth naming plainly. Once you leave a biome, most of those forms lose practical relevance. The Jawfish gets overused on backtracking runs. Harlo's own late-game abilities - surfing electrical cables, submerging in magnetic ooze - start to make the morph roster feel redundant. The creature-absorption fantasy that sells the game in hour one is quietly walked back by hour eight. It is a real missed opportunity, and several reviewers pointed it out. If Lucid Dreams Studio had trusted their central mechanic through to the endgame instead of pivoting to standard metroidvania power-gating, BIOMORPH would be a harder recommendation to qualify. Outside combat, there is a light town-rebuilding system centred on the hub of Blightmoor. Collect blueprints out in the world, bring them back, and you gradually restore shops, vendors, and labs that feed new weapons and mementos back into your build. Mementos slot into your loadout alongside combat chips for things like faster healing or boosted boss damage. It is not deep city-builder stuff - managing expectations here is important - but it gives each excursion a secondary purpose beyond progression gates, and the sense of a world slowly coming back to life around you is genuinely satisfying. The side quests threaded through Blightmoor's NPCs are charming without tipping into forced comedy, which is a trickier balance than most indie games manage. The presentation is the game's other clear strength. BIOMORPH's hand-drawn art has a distinctive inked quality - darker palette, post-processing contrast between zones, creature designs that sit somewhere between grotesque and cartoonishly appealing. Cutscenes animate like a Saturday morning action show done with real craft. Harlo's movement is fluid, controls feel responsive, and the optional liquid-slide dash makes traversal feel quick even in areas you're revisiting for the fifth time. On the difficulty front: the game has a light souls-adjacent currency-drop-on-death system that can be toggled off entirely in the menu, and the splash dash is borderline invincibility for much of the game if you lean on it. Seasoned metroidvania players may find the challenge lighter than expected. Steam user reception sits at 91% positive across several hundred reviews, and the critical consensus lands in the same place - a solid, distinctive metroidvania that does one thing exceptionally well but doesn't fully commit to it. If you have burned through Hollow Knight, Ori, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and are looking for the next thing, BIOMORPH scratches that same itch with a mechanic you haven't used before. Just go in knowing the back half leans more on Harlo than on the creatures that make the front half special.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on BIOMORPH.