Grade: C+
Point and Click Adventure with a forgettable story
Panmorphia, developed by a solo dev in 2020, is a retro callback to point-and-click games from the 90s. Each scene you are presented with has hidden objects and small clickable areas. Alongside the “find object and use object on the other object” trope, you must also solve a few other miscellaneous puzzles.
Where Panmorphia shines is when you can turn into a few different animals. You can explore the same scene multiple times as a bird, fish, cat, or human. This adds an intriguing layer to see the same visual but from a different perspective.
As with most point-and-click games, the frustration comes in when it’s unclear what can be clicked and how to navigate the maps. Thankfully, in Panmorphia, you can set an “easy” mode where you get navigation arrows and highlights that make it much clearer how to get to things.
Thin story
I am not the biggest fan of the point-and-click genre, but I can get on board if it goes with a good story. Some of the classics, like Myst, or another game I reviewed for this site, J.U.L.I.A Among the Stars, can keep you persevering through the point-and-click drudgery with a compelling yarn.
But in Panmorphia, there’s not much to hang your hat on storywise. You start the game by picking up an object on a cliff and get pulled against your will into a fantasy world. The fantasy world isn’t all that fantastical, though. Most of the objects are pretty run-of-the-mill. You’ve got some spades, axes, a machete, a hairball, and pretty standard stuff. There are a few fantastical bits, but it just feels like it’s not fully realized.
Your only way to escape this Panmorphia world is to free some elemental spirits that have been captured and recharge an amulet. But, you never discover what caught these spirits or why. Without any depth to the lore, the story felt like a shallow wrapper around the puzzles and point-and-click stuff, which was unsatisfying.
One shout-out to the developer is that they published a complete walkthrough on their site. Without that fallback, I would have had a very low chance of getting through the game. I was able to experience the whole story.
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