14 DAY TRIAL // 
The janitor has surely had better days than this. He’s trapped in a level filled with violet growths that will kill him on touch, even though he is wearing a very professional-looking hazmat suit. He can deal with some of them by simply jumping carefully, and moving from clean platform to clean platform. Others can be avoided by turning slimy crawlers into blocks and placing them on the hostile flora.
There are also flying monsters (everything kills on touch) that can be turned using the special gun into floating platforms, opening up access to new areas. Combine the monsters with a conveyor belt to deal with a fairly challenging platforming section that leads to the end of this level. The problem is how to get the timing right so that our janitor can leap from the moving block to the floater at the exact right moment before he hits a violet plant.
Because the slimes move on the conveyor, it’s possible to miss them entirely and then it’s a long wait until a drone appears, beams them up, and returns them to their initial position. This recycling system is needed and designed to ensure gamers can complete puzzles even if they do something wrong initially. The big problem is the game offers nothing to fill the downtime between attempts.
Transmogrify is both developed and published by Odyssey Entertainment. I played it on the PC using Steam. The game is a pretty basic platformer with a unique twist linked to a gun that can transmogrify creatures.
The hero of this story is Chris, a janitor working inside a massive lab that is suddenly overrun by a variety of creatures that Perfect Future Labs created or used for testing. The premise is simple and there’s not much narrative to enjoy. Chris has almost no personality and his only companion is Grace, the Artificial Intelligence that is supposed to manage the facility.
She’s unable to deal with the situation or even operate simple machinery situated inside the levels. But she can talk to the main character, offering a few bits of lore and commenting on his efforts. The game clearly aims for an easy Portal-like relationship between the two but the writing is not good enough for that. Players should not come to Transmogrify expecting a deep and carefully built evolution for these two characters.
But Chris does have a unique tool, a gun that can target the many escaped specimens and can transform them. The officially named TRMG-107 allows players to fire a charge at any creature in the level and make it into something that will aid the platforming. A crawling slime will become a block to hump on to reach a higher ledge.
A flying enemy will become a platform with a preset route, and so on. I quickly started to enter a level and, rather than see enemies that kill on touch, create plans on how to best use specimens to move toward the exit. Sometimes solving a puzzle also involves repeated transformations to get a creature into the best position. Don’t forget to also look for the specimen canisters and collect them.
It’s a very good core gameplay idea and the game executes it well. The game features 4 worlds for the janitor to explore, with 75 levels that steadily increase the level of challenge, in both terms of puzzle complexity and platforming difficulty.
Levels aren‘t huge, which makes them well-suited to bite-sized gaming sessions. And players get rated after each of them, with the game evaluating both their speed and how many shots from the transmogrifying gun they used to complete them. It offers a clear idea of how a level should be approached and gives players who love the idea of a speedrun more reasons to return to sections and improve their performance.
Transmogrify’s core idea delivers some very satisfying moments when it finally clicks how a mix of transformation and movement can lead to a new specimen sample or the end of the level. This is a great game for a player who’s interested in the platforming genre.
It’s not without problems. Recycling drones can take a long time to bring back a creature needed for a puzzle sequence. After turning a slime into a block the only way to move it away from a wall is to unfreeze it. Movement something feels too floaty for situations when precision is needed. But the game is mostly a fun and easy-to-understand platformer with a strong turning enemies into objects concept at its core.
Transmogrify is a fairly basic-looking experience with a good style. The janitor is always in his environmental suit and doesn’t reveal his emotions and the creature-into-object transformations aren’t interesting by themselves. The Perfect Future Labs levels are clearly laid out, giving gamers all the information they need when it comes to gathering specimens and getting to the exit. Given the premise, the game could have tried to deliver more weirdness for both levels and creatures.
Grace is the main voice players will get to hear as they push through the puzzles. Her comments are supposed to be a mix of encouragement and humor while the janitor mostly grunts as he explores. The voice work is average. The soundtrack is a little more interesting, with some nice themes that reduce the frustration of trying a challenge for the seventh time.
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The Good
- Transmogrification-aided platforming
- Good-level puzzles
- Focus on speedrunning
The Bad
- Transmogrification needs to be used more
- Limited narrative
- Movement is a little floaty
Conclusion
Considering how much potential the transmogrification process has, the game is very tame in its overall approach. The janitor and Grace also fail to become interesting as a pair, which makes it harder to move forward for someone who does not love platforming. Transmogrify’s unique idea is good enough to be used in more interesting ways and I hope the team at Odyssey is exploring them for a future game that would offer higher narrative stakes and expand the world.
A review key was provided by the publisher
