One of the oddest things to pop up during the most recent Nintendo Direct was the revelation of an online indie title called Meccha Chameleon. Coming to us from indie developer lemorion_1224 (who was fortunate enough to get LEMORION for the eShop release), it’s a hide-and-seek style game that incorporates elements of color changing through paint and careful body placement in order to fool the “hunter” team. Armed with a colorful shotgun of sorts, the hunter team gradually gets bigger the more hiders are “found,” and a team wins when either the chameleons successfully stay hidden for the duration or the hunters find everyone. It’s a fairly straightforward concept with a fun little twist about color changing. Having said that, nothing about it seems that spectacular. Or unique. Or fun, even.

Attending the annual gathering of bland white guys. Yes, in Wisconsin.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a decent enough concept, and I did pick it up to mess around with shortly after the Direct dropped. There’s certainly enough substance here to, theoretically, make your time with Meccha Chameleon one that’s more versatile and exciting.

First off, there’s your standard game mode of a couple of hunters paired with a huge number of chameleons. There’s a sort of reverse chicken race where each person, in turn, paints themselves up and then everyone, as a group, tries to find where that one person is hiding. There’s a variety of body poses and body types to choose (polygonal, floppy humanoid, big or small) to help give you choices in design. And there are a solid number of stages to choose from, including a collaboration with Japan’s own indie darling, Exit 8. As meccha is Japanese for “very” or “extremely,” you can see where they linked up.

The execution is something that ultimately comes down to three kinds of input: players, performance, and experience. The first couple of games of Meccha Chameleon will be odd as you figure out the button configuration, the mechanics and other aspects of the game you might not be used to. The paint mode allows you to do joystick or Joy-Con mouse mode, which I guess is the excuse for why this is a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. If you’ve got that eye for detail and patience, you can bang out some truly brilliant color swaths, blending your character into most surfaces and areas with refined technique. It can be thrilling to use the eyedropper to really drill down on getting the right shades so you aren’t just a black bar against a black wall, but granular with how you match the “texture” of your environment.

Or just clever in hiding spots, if the paint work isn’t great.

The entirety of Meccha Chameleon is really straightforward, which is perfect for a lot of players. If you’ve played any amazing shooting games recently, you know how to walk around and bust bullets into surfaces. Some games will limit the hunter’s ammunition, so firing wildly isn’t a solution. If you’re hiding, then you put on your warpaint and you wait. I positively adore hide-and-seek, so being able to post up somewhere and watch hunters walk by you again and again was thrilling in a fun way. My kids were sitting right there with me, giggling whenever I managed to live another day. I did have to mute my microphone a lot of the time because of this, because nothing says “come and find me” like dueling laugh tracks whenever a hunter leaves the area.

But this is also a streamer game, which is why I believe Nintendo selected this to be in the direct. When Among Us suddenly popped into the mainstream consciousness, it exploded with downloads, views and sudden talk of porting this simple game of deception to every possible platform. There’s been a revelation with developers and publishers: you can create and profit from live service games, offering temporary enjoyment for very real, permanent money. You might not be able to enjoy The Simpsons: Tapped Out anymore, but Electronic Arts still has the 130 million dollars that it generated, and that probably brings them joy. So when this indie game was making its rounds on Twitch, niconico and YouTube, it made sense for lemorion_1224 to want to blow it up further, and for Nintendo to capitalize on promoting it so they’d get their slice of the pie.

As you can see, some people worked exceptionally hard on their color coordination.

I bring this up because you also have a game here with Meccha Chameleon that is equal parts temporary fun and utterly frustrating. When the game is good and runs well, it can be a lot of fun. People get very creative both in their coloring and poses, so there can be a real challenge to finding other players or trying to remain hidden for as long as possible. There’s a certain degree of joy to being in a game with a number of either exceedingly professional players or exceedingly casual, and even moreso when it’s a mixed bag. You can easily toggle on or off the mic and headset options, so you don’t have to listen to other players if you don’t want to, though it might be good for communicating where you’ve already looked. Plus, you know, taunting other players, in a foreign language, is its own fun.

But that also means that things can be more difficult than expected, particularly if you do crossplay. I am a huge proponent of crossplay, and a game that just launched on the Nintendo Switch 2 sharing a playerbase with literally anyone who owns a PC is a big and smart get to help keep the engagement and numbers up. Having said that, I’m 99% certain I kept getting matched with players who had figured out how to game the system. I say that because accusing someone of cheating outright feels gross, especially when I don’t know the limitations of the game. But when everyone is twenty feet up in the air stuck to the sides of buildings, or one player has become a sprite the size of my shoe who is still able to run around instead of “hiding,” I feel like that’s not in the core rulebook.

That little red dude JUST KEPT RUNNING AROUND. I don’t think that’s legit???

Also, the game is unstable, flat out. Meccha Chameleon has the regular problems of being an online based game (already a variable that can go any which way) and now you’re adding in the stress of matching with everyone across the world. There were times where I just couldn’t join some games. Sometimes menus wouldn’t load and I couldn’t even SEE games. The tag system to identify where you were and what game you wanted felt like it removed options instead of adding them. I hated to finally join a game and then just suddenly find myself back at the main menu with no explanation whatsoever. I can’t tell if this is the fault of the software, the servers or just God Herself, but I spent more time trying to join and rejoin a game than actually play it.

There was a summer when I was all about Pogs. My brother and I got a ton, we played against my friends around town, and we created our own rules to try and make the game last longer (you can only use your metal Slammer ONCE). It was joyful, it was stupid, it was a good time and a waste of money. Where are my Michael Jordan Pogs now? I do wish I could find them. But that’s Meccha Chameleon. It’s this fun, ridiculous, very flawed game that people, mostly children, are going to love and enjoy for the next block of time and then move on. For six bucks, it’s not a bad ride, and I hope lemoniron uses this as a jumping off point to make something more in the future. In the meantime, though, I imagine plenty of people will have meccha fun. But I’m meccha done.

Meccha Chameleon is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch 2.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.