Metaphor: ReFantasia is not a horror game – it’s a fantasy RPG with a story that gets better over time and a combat system that’s complex and satisfying. But whenever I encounter the “humans”, monsters whose visual design has nothing to do with the humans I have ever seen in my life, I get this feeling metaphor belongs in both genres.
[Ed. note: The following contains spoilers for some of the enemy designs in Metaphor: ReFantazio.]
The first major dungeon you enter metaphor starts with a bang. The soldiers charging ahead of you in battle are almost instantly murdered by a giant, floating creature with multiple humanoid arms and legs, a skull-like face with outwardly extending wings and horns, and a torso encased in a red, egg-like shell.
“There it is,” says your new companion Strohl in a quiet voice. “That’s a… human.”
This is not the only type of person Metaphor: ReFantasia. As you progress through this dungeon, you’ll encounter other smaller humans, lumbering, bipedal creatures whose torsos are encased in massive white eggshells. And it’s not just this one dungeon. All cities and towns in metaphor are regularly terrorized by these people and no one knows why. And somehow each person looks more bizarre than the next.
The Egg Thing becomes somewhat of a theme for the human designs, as it is the design for one of the most striking early human boss fights. Here’s some official artwork for the egg monster in question:
I don’t know what I expected when I entered this monster’s eggshell, but it wasn’t a bunch of armored frog soldiers sitting around a wooden table. I’m about 35 hours into the game and so far the presence of these monsters – and the reason why everyone calls them “humans” – has yet to be explained. You just see
I praised this game to my colleagues for its originality in monster design, but they immediately pointed out to me that these monsters were clearly inspired by the works of the 16th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Especially his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights
Bosch’s original painting is huge, almost 13 feet wide; It is a trinity, with the Garden of Eden on the left, the human world in the middle and hell on the right. This panel on the far right depicts the Egg Monster’s inspiration, along with many other bizarre-looking creatures that fit well with Bosch’s idea of hell.
I may not yet know what these monsters are about in fiction, but at least I now know where these designs originated, and it was fun to see similarities between the various people in this game and those depicted in Bosch’s Designs to find paintings. So if you play too metaphorTurns out you got a secret lesson in art history.