Painting, Camouflaging, Fearing: "Meccha Chameleon" Becomes a Steam Hit
A virtual brush, 24 players, and a whole lot of audacity: The simple indie game "Meccha Chameleon" becomes a hit on Steam within a few days.
What do you get when you combine the painting program Paint with hide-and-seek games? Probably the game "Meccha Chameleon", released on June 10. At first glance, it meets all the criteria of being one of the many trash games that appear daily on Steam: an incomprehensible name, a single developer who only posts in Japanese on his X account, short development time. There's no publisher either.
But the game was discovered by livestreamers and became a real hit within a few days. The game principle is simple: you try to hide from your fellow players for as long as possible. But instead of hiding in cupboards or under tables, you use painting tools to paint your body and blend in with your surroundings like a chameleon.
After its release, success stories piled up: On June 12, Lemorion, the developer, announced 500,000 game sales, two days later the million was already cracked, and on June 15, the thank you for two million sales followed. According to the analysis platform SteamDB, "Meccha Chameleon" also experienced its peak of more than 132,000 concurrent players on that day.
How "Meccha Chameleon" works
As in other party games, you start in a lobby with up to 23 fellow players. There are two teams: Hunters and Chameleons. While Chameleons hide, Hunters try to find all Chameleons within a few minutes. Chameleons have about one and a half minutes before the match starts to create a hiding place in the world. Currently, there are five maps. More user-created maps are available in the workshop.
The game takes place in detailed rooms with numerous furniture and scattered objects. As a chameleon, you crouch, stand, or lie down in a place of your choice. With a pipette, you pick up the color of your surroundings and paint your white body like a canvas.
Your goal: to be as inconspicuous as possible. Ideally, a hunter will overlook you even if they are standing right in front of you. It's not just about your painting skills, but also about your audacity. You can hide in deliberately obvious places and hope that the hunters wouldn't suspect a chameleon there.
The host of the current lobby has access to various game modes and settings. For example, they can set chameleons to automatically emit a quiet whistle after 45 seconds. As a chameleon, you can voluntarily whistle and thus delay your automatic whistle. This way, your character ideally remains silent exactly when a hunter is near you.
Easily accessible, but with technical weaknesses
While chameleons anxiously await whether their camouflage works, hunters train their eyes. The game principle is easy to learn and offers fun for everyone. "Meccha Chameleon" is also interesting because of its low price: it costs less than ten euros or francs. This makes it perfect for spontaneous "What else are we doing tonight?" rounds on Discord.
The developer doesn't seem to be resting on his laurels, but continues to work on the game. At the end of the week, he plans to release an additional map and is busy fixing the many bugs complained about in the Steam reviews. He already released three patches on the release day, with more to follow. With just over 5000 reviews, the game currently stands at 79 percent and is thus "mostly positive".
On Twitch, you can watch streamers play hide-and-seek.
Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.
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