Biomorph Creators Explain Why Narrative Elements Are Crucial To Their Metroidvania

Highlights

The game Biomorph combines unique Kirby-like mechanics with traditional Metroidvania features for an unconventional gaming experience.
Lucid Dreams included a significant amount of dialogue and narrative elements in Biomorph to create a more immersive and engaging storyline.
The use of sentient arms for on-the-fly exposition and a quest system in the game provides players with purpose and direction.

Lucid Dreams’ Biomorph is a unique Metroidvania, combining Kirby-like devouring mechanics with traditional features you’d expect from the genre.

Another non-traditional aspect of Biomorph is the amount of dialogue and ‘hard’ narrative elements in the game. In your typical Metroidvania, the amount of dialogue is limited as these games tend to rely on atmosphere and environmental storytelling.

In a recent interview with Game Rant, Lucid Dreams co-founders Maxime Grégoire and Francis Lapierre spoke about why a more in-your-face narrative was important for Biomorph.

Exposition Is Key

“We felt like to be able to convey the story we wanted, to make this a world that you feel was destroyed and makes you wonder why…” Lapierre begins. “If you don’t have any NPCs or discussion to tell you about this then you will just not care. Maybe it’s not bad, but you won’t be invested in our vision. So yeah, it was deliberate.”

Lucid Dreams accomplished a lot of Biomorph’s on-the-fly exposition through the sentient arms of protagonist Harlo. Having these two characters constantly attached to the player allowed Lucid Dreams the flexibility to inject narrative elements whenever required.

Biomorph’s Combat Proved ‘Challenging’ To Figure Out, Says Developers

When you can transform into your enemies, combat becomes much more difficult to balance.

“The arms that can talk to you means we can create dialogue by being alone…” Lapierre says. “…which is kind of interesting, because then you can create a situation where you not only think on your own, but still have a discussion with two NPCs that are always available to talk to you.”

Biomorph also has a quest system, stemming from the pair’s dual love of Metroidvanias and RPGs. Quests give the player a solid sense of direction and progression.

“Quests give you purpose,” Lapierre opens. “When you start a game and don’t really know what you should do, just go do some quests and the quest will bring you to other places. But quests without NPCs are weird. We could have a big quest board, and you could just get quests from there, but it’s less fun than finding an NPC that asks you to do something.”

Biomorph was released at the beginning of April and is currently available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.