Metaphor: ReFantazio is shaping up to be dangerous for me, as someone who has never played an Atlus RPG—mostly because the developer's veer away from psychic dream-delving high schoolers and into high fantasy is exactly my kind of bag.
And now there's a demo! Announced earlier today and re-announced during the Tokyo Game Show, the Metaphor: ReFantazio prologue demo lets you play (you guessed it) the prologue—and it's downright meaty.
The Steam page promises the "first four" dungeons, seven out of the game's 40 Archetypes—which function as classes the characters can equip—and "six followers, including party members who will support the protagonist's journey".
- D&D-skewering, Disco Elysium-inspired RPG Esoteric Ebb had me trying my best to be a cleric while my Intelligence stat kept telling me to become a wizard-king
- Shape of Dreams' demo shows off an ingenious roguelike that wields Risk of Rain-tier finesse with action MOBA chaos, and I think I might be in love
I'm still downloading this 24-gig heft of a demo as I write this, but players are already reporting they've got about four to five hours with it, which is downright generous—alas, they're also reporting some performance problems which I've got on good authority aren't isolated.
"I have a 7950x3d and an rtx 4090 and my GPU utilisation is all over the place," writes one player on the game's subreddit. "When dashing it dips down to 70%, and when standing still it will go back up to 100% with frame rates uncapped."
Which is a shame, considering Timothy Monbleau, who's played the game on behalf of PC Gamer last month, reckons it's quite good: "I have a sinking feeling that Metaphor: ReFantazio is going to consume hundreds of hours of my time when it comes out in October."
However, taking a look at the Steam reviews, the culprit could be the game automatically rendering at 125% resolution, though other naysayers are rejecting the fix. Optimisation woes are notoriously tricky to diagnose, though, and I imagine there'll be patches to come.
Still, if you can deal with bumpy pre-launch frame drops—unfortunately not a rarity in our current age, with games getting bigger and bigger—then there's really no reason not to check the demo out, especially since your save should let you pick up where you left off if you buy the full game come October: "The save data you create in this demo version can be used to continue playing the full version with the same story and character status."
Performance issues aside, such a chunky demo shows remarkable confidence—though considering Atlus has a bit of a pedigree under its belt with Persona, that's not unwarranted. Metaphor: ReFantazio will arrive October 11.
