What if I told you that next year you’d be able to play a game that feels like it’s taken all the best bits from the best Nintendo Switch games like Hollow Knight and Super Mario Odyssey and put them all together? Well, that game is Biomorph, and following six years of tender love and care, it’s about to be released into the wild.
Biomorph is the second game from Lucid Games Studio, set up by industry veterans Maxime Grégoire and Francis Lapierre, who have credits on the likes of Far Cry 5, Thief, Tomb Raider, and Deus Ex. And while they both had cushy jobs in the triple-A industry, Biomorph’s creation was written in the stars.
“When we were at school, Maxime said let’s go to work, make some money, and then in ten years reconvene and start up our own studio,” Lapierre tells The Loadout at Gamescom. “So ten years down the line, Maxime called me and said ‘it’s time to leave Ubisoft’, and I did.
“I had a nice job, but when I was younger I always told myself that I’d have my own game company one day, and I did not want to regret it.”
And Lapierre hasn’t regretted making that decision. While showing me Biomorph at Gamescom, the Frenchman was rarely seen without a smile on his face – he knows he’s onto a winner.
Biomorph is a soulslike metroidvania at heart. You play as a bat-like creature with massive ears and a penchant for snuffing out the monsters. While you’ll defeat enemies and take on their form and powers, just like in Kirby, you will eventually have to work out how to outsmart them again at a later date. That’s because in Biomorph, your enemies will return bigger and better than before.
“If you biomorph into that monster, then it’ll learn a little bit about what you do,” Lapierre explains. “So when you next see them, they’ll use powers that you do.” There’s a monster in the level I played, for example, that can run and perform a charge attack. But when you defeat and morph into it, you’ll quickly realise it has a scream attack too.
By the time I’d met this big baddie again, I’d screamed the house down – so much so, in fact, that it started using it against me. Now this monster was supercharged, giving me a more challenging boss fight that required me to use all my skills in battle.
And while it’s challenging, it’s important to say here that Biomorph isn’t as difficult as the games it’s borrowing ideas from. Lucid Dreams wants Biomorph to be challenging, but not impossible and in an age where soulslikes are getting more and more hardcore, that’s a welcome addition.
Biomorph is set to release on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023.