METAMORPHOSIS is one of those indie games quietly climbing Steam wishlists. Made by luxan and published by Top Hat Studios, this pixel art horror action game follows a nun branded a sinner through a dead world. It passed 150,000 wishlists over the summer, and a free playtest, expanded on 17 September, is open to everyone on Steam. There’s no release date yet, and the game currently supports English, Latin American Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. For fans of punishing horror, it’s a name worth keeping an eye on.
At a glance
METAMORPHOSIS is a pixel art horror action game by luxan, published by Top Hat Studios and Doyoyo Games.
It passed 150,000 wishlists on 21 July and ranks 345th among the most wishlisted unreleased games on Steam.
A free playtest, updated on 17 September with three difficulty levels and a new area, is open on Steam.
METAMORPHOSIS sends a forsaken nun through a dead world
The Steam page sets the scene in a few lines. You play as Aria, a forsaken nun seeking absolution, in a future where “humanity has manufactured its own rapture” and the surface of the Earth has long since collapsed under war and decay. You cross megastructures, fight demons and push on towards the last paradise. The game is built on deliberate, high-risk combat, with firearms and miracles, across large interconnected areas.
Confession is the detail that jumps out. The confessional doubles as a save point, and the Steam page warns you to be careful who may be listening. The game’s menu takes the form of a command line, MS-DOS style, with commands such as BESTIARY and JOURNAL.
Ted Litchfield played the playtest for PC Gamer back in the spring. In his piece on a 2D platformer that genuinely scared him, he describes gruesome pixel art that feels like “a cross between Signalis, Blasphemous, and the yet-unreleased Radio the Universe”, and notes that you can double jump, wall jump, dash and pogo from the word go. His verdict is short: “I love this game.” The same chill runs through Whispers in the Fog, a one-man horror project, in a very different style.
150,000 wishlists and a publisher since April
The game’s rise can be tracked through luxan’s own Steam posts. A first open playtest went live on 9 December 2025, and the count went from 30,000 wishlists on 15 December to 60,000 in January, then 100,000 on 3 May. The 150,000 mark was passed on 21 July, according to the developer’s announcement.
On 21 April, METAMORPHOSIS found its publisher. Top Hat Studios revealed it during its Spring Showcase 2026, and Doyoyo Games is also listed as co-publisher on Steam. As of Tuesday morning, Valve’s official chart puts METAMORPHOSIS 345th among the most wishlisted unreleased games on Steam.
The game was also playable at Tokyo Game Show on the Top Hat Studios stand, according to the Japanese site Denfaminicogamer. It joins a small wave of indie horror games using a demo to build an audience, such as Deadpact, the horror game where every wound sticks.
What the 17 September playtest adds
The big playtest update landed on 17 September, timed with Tokyo Game Show. It adds three difficulty levels, Easy, Normal and Hard, with luxan calling Normal the intended experience. A new area, the Underground Bunker, arrives alongside a camera mechanic, while the Monastery and Warzone maps have been greatly expanded. The same update brought Spanish, Japanese and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese translations, with luxan thanking Top Hat for the Japanese and Chinese work.
Aria also picks up new moves: a slide, a taunt and a parry that sends projectiles back for four times the damage. On Hard, the respawn statues are gone and falls become deadly. Be warned: saves from the earlier playtest won’t carry over to this version.
As for requirements, METAMORPHOSIS runs on Windows only, with 4GB of RAM at minimum and a Vulkan-capable graphics card. If you enjoyed End of Abyss and its sci-fi horror, the free playtest is the best way to get a feel for it while you wait for a date.
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