Game Title: Plastomorphosis
Platform: PS5
Release Date: Jan 24 2024
Developer: VidyGames Studio
Review copy supplied by publisher

What’s Plastomorphosis about?

You play a citizen, male or female that has been transported to a location called modern-city, however when we get there we find that it is also in chaos from dark energy and you get a recording from a character called Eva who has tried to escape already and she leaves you clues as to how to scape also. This modern-city uses energy called Re.Surs that is using this dark energy. There is a new process in this city to bring a new humanity is Plastomorphosis but is failing and creating creatures around the city. You must rescue Eva and make it to safety to a nexus tower mentioned that is said to offer protection to you.

What’s the combat and controls like?

Plastomorphosis takes on the control system of past horror survival titles like Resident Evil and Silent Hill with clunky 4-way directional controls (tank controls) where up in forwards and down, been walking back but also allows you to choose a more modern version of the control system too. You either love this retro aspect or you hate it or grow to hate and love it. The camera angles ae something else, similar to Resident Evil but some different angles like running towards and away from the screen. A couple of hours of gameplay is below.

How does the game look graphically?

The aesthetic of Plastomorphosis is to make it look like PS1/PS2/Xbox360 era survival horror titles playing homage to those titles with added grain / foggy corridor aesthetic. There is some lighting but i did find it to be very dark in certain areas which made finding some stuff harder than it should have been but fortunately they used a similar sparkle effect like Resident Evil for some items on-screen. I think they took this effect a little too far making it almost too grainy to see the details on the screen.

How does the game Play and Sound?

I found the gameplay to be okay at first but found some of the puzzles to be that little extra frustrating as you got little to no clues and found myself stuck a lot of moving back and forth to the same place. It felt the combat scenarios had me running around in circles trying to get the gunshots to connect with the crazy mannequins not having enough bullets in the end. This was similar to the original Resident Evil game that you didn’t know if your shots were connecting at all. The sound is okay, but could have been better to raise suspense given the titles genre.

Conclusion

I really wanted to love Plastomorphosis, been a fan of retro Resident Evil and Silent Hill but i just couldn’t get into it and i think the lack of assistance or clues in the puzzles making me frustrated didn’t really help. There seemed to be little effort put into character design, not just the enemies but your character also making you out to be a motorcyclist who doesn’t take their helmet off and you never get a sense of story if you cant even see who you are. Plastomorphosis comes across as a small indie title that you might grab on a sale for survival horror nostalgia, but replayability would be pretty much zero.