Morphopolis is a very short "hidden object game" that consists of 5 levels, each of which lets you control a different bug to try to collect objects, solve mini-puzzles and uh....complete the objective? I'm not sure I ever understood the "plot".
I didn't especially like this game. It's not bad, it just isn't interesting, entertaining, new, or fun (with the exception of some of the mini-puzzles). You spend about 80% of the game walking around with absolutely horrid controls; you hold click where you want to walk but the pathways do not at all line up with the graphics. If you click on your bug, green pixels spray out indicating where the pathways lead, but I literally didn't figure this out until the 5th and final level because the game has no text. Communicating purely with visuals is ok as long as the player doesn't miss key elements or misunderstands something because of lack of clarity. (protip to dev: do not make the "Menu" icon the same as the "Return to Main Menu" icon).
Anyway, even when knowing where the pathways are, navigation is still hard and frequently leads to your bug spazzing around or causing an unintentional screen change, which takes 10-15 seconds to complete. So the point is: the majority of this game is backtracking, which isn't necessarily bad until its made worse by bad controls and many boring intermissions of the screen changing. The only saving grace is that, after collecting all the pieces of a certain thing, you must solve a mini-puzzle, none of which were challenging or novel, but they were the closest thing to fun that i found in this game.
Aside from that there isn't too much else to say. The music was ok but quickly wore its welcome. The visuals were nice -as many people say- but the way that things move make it feel like it's a beginner-intermediate Flash creation. The way things you clicked lazily drifted to the left side of the screen kind of enforced this thought. (Honestly it made me think halfway through: this game seems like it almost might just be something you'd find on Newgrounds.)
Lastly, I feel like I have to mention also that the Steam store page (IMO) is very misleading. You do not "start as an aphid grub", you play as it for one level (and not the first); the game is not about "an epic journey of metamorphosis", as far as I can tell; and the comparison to Machinarium -a 5-hour game that does a wonderful job creating its own world- is fanciful.
In the end I didn't find Morphopolis to offer anything new or interesting even though I felt like it thought itself very clever. The puzzles were ok but they weren't enough to carry the majority of the time dealing with the poor controls and screen changes, and the visuals were nice but ruined by meh animations. Add on top of all of this that the gameplay for me was a mere 87 minutes and I was just completely unfulfilled. It felt like a demo or a concept more than an actual game and was intentionally padded out by the slow walk speed of the bug and the absolutely ridiculous screen change lengths. I wouldn't recommend against it, but I definitely wouldn't recommend for it.
