Morph Girl – The FMV Game Inspired by Japanese Horror Movies

FMV Gaming may not necessarily be dead after all…

I know very little about Japanese 90’s horror movies. Maybe a few, such as the original version of ‘The Ring’, but then again I’m not certain if that was the 90’s. What I do, however, know a lot about is FMV games. I was (confession time) a massive FMV fan in the 90’s.

The FMV genre died a well deserved death in the early 00’s due to a rather lackluster amount of shovel ware games. I vaguely recall a lot of them being Star Trek related.

In 2015, however, ‘Her Story’ was released. The game reminded the market that FMV was a viable medium for game making and story telling, just as long as it was done correctly. Morph Girl is going to hope to emulate the success of ‘Her Story’ by being an interactive horror story inspired by Japanese horror. If it’s anything as good as it sounds, you might not want to wear your best underpants while playing this.

What is Morph Girl about?

From the Steam Store page, the game is described as:

Morph Girl is a FMV Point And Click/Visual Novel developed as a homage to 90/00’s low-fi Japanese horror movies. Inspired by home VHS tapes, Morph Girl intends to evoke the most personal fears surrounding the presence of the unknown within one’s home.

Elana Pierce is a grieving widow that cannot seem to move on following the tragic death of her wife, Rebecca. When a mysterious, supernatural being begins to force itself into her daily life – playing upon the memories of the dearly departed – she must make the decision to embrace or reject the creature.

Will you reject its invitation? Or embrace it?

In regards to interactive story, it does seem to be on the grow. We recently reported how NetFlix announced plans for Childrens Choose your own adventure stories. You can read about that by clicking here.

Hang on, what is FMV exactly?

FMV, or Full Motion Video, is basically a posh way of having video in an interactive format. Most of you would probably be familiar with FMV from the god awful game, Nighttrap. Which is, for some reason, going to make a come back to PS4, Xbox and PC.

I personally most fondly remember FMV from it’s very first game. The 7th Guest. Now, I love the 7th Guest and hopefully my editor will one day allow me to write a 10,000 history on Trilobyte Games, but in the mean time, I’ll keep it brief. In 1993, it was practically the first CD-ROM game for PC’s and the first to use FMV video on such an interactive scale. The real genius behind the technology initially was the ability to compress video to a point that it could fit onto 1 or 2 cd-roms.

With a CD-ROM only holding about 660mb data, the problem that FMV suffered was that by the late 90’s and early 00’s, you would see FMV games being sold on 4-8 disk packs. Combined with poor quality production and video, the genre was milked to death and doomed to die.

It was hoped that ‘Her Story’ would provide a ‘shot in the arm’ to the genre. It was a decent game and showed that if done correctly, FMV still had a future. People still decided to ignore it though, a pity.

I really hope that Morph Girl does well. I have a soft spot for FMV gaming and frankly, it does look scary as hell. Then again, The 7th Guest scared the bejesus out of me.

Here’s the link to the Steam Store Page for Morph Girl again and just because I love you, lets all have a sing along with our tennis rackets… NIGHT-TRAP!