To say that one of my closest friend groups absolutely loves Meccha Chameleon is an understatement.

Every Friday now, and even some other days of the week, up to 5 of my adult, busy, fully responsibility laden friends will actively carve out the time to play this game of advanced digital hide and seek. It’s a manual Prop Hunt that offers people the chance to hide in various 3d rendered arenas that range from the original to the nostalgic to the educational. Windfall Island can be the stage of your next hunt, right after having digitally explored the painting equivalent of the renaissance’s best hits, or someone’s homage to a pop star.

The variety continues when you consider that unlike prop hunt or other games of the genre, Meccha Chameleon also decides that its best to have the players figure out the disguises themselves. Did you want to be a painting? I hope you know how to paint in Paint.net; failure to do so results in getting slammed in the face with enough paintballs to make you explode.net.

There are two roles in the standard play of the game: hunters and chameleons. The hunter(s) wait for a little while as the chameleons hide. This takes at least a minute, but the timers can be changed. Once the timer is out, the hunters are put into the arena, armed with a gun and they have a limited amount of time to find everyone. If the hunter has a chameleon in their line of sight, but doesn’t shoot the chameleon, the chameleon earns points. These points are ostensibly how Chameleons “win” should they all be found.

Meccha Chameleon is a game that is tailor made for the age of late stage dead internet. Friends? Found them. Simple game? Hide and seek, baby. It’s also extremely well poised for shorts on social media, with moments of comedy seemingly coming quickly and often to content creators. Unlikely escapes, crass hiding spots, incredible hunts; this kind of stuff packages nicely into 15 second clips. What this misses, however, is how much more to the game there is than these 15 seconds of comedy and engagement.

Most of the game is one of two things; searching or waiting. If you are searching, you are trying to find your friends throughout the whole time. Honestly, it’s the most engaging way to play. There are issues; harsh ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hiding spots tend to create lasting impressions. I don’t expect most chameleons to survive more than a couple of times in certain levels by painting themselves into a literal corner and sitting out the timer.

Hunters do have a problem though. If you are a hunter, you are now at the most risk of being a moron. While searching all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ places for slight variations in pixels or a misplaced shadow, you are constantly aware of how little time left you have to find everyone. If you miss people, or they evade you and your paint gun, you are now stupid and terrible at the game.

Then there's the hiding, AKA waiting. It is waiting, no matter which way you look at it. You paint yourself. Good, nice, excellent. And now what? If you’ve given the painters 2 minutes to paint and you don’t use the whole 2, you’re waiting. If you use the whole 2 and stop when the hunters come in, then you get to wait until they find you or… not.

The brave amongst the chameleons can reposition, repaint, and hide somewhere new on the regular. This is voluntary exposure to risk. This is for the people who play the game often or find no frustration with the game’s painting controls. Credit here, the painting controls are robust and offer a lot of difficult-to-wield power in a game about (not) getting shot in the face. They are also ♥♥♥♥. There is a literacy that is required, a practiced hand and facility with the hotkeys needed, in order to hide well. This is where a lot of digital art students will shine. Now with saturation sliders and a sometimes functioning eyedropper tool, you too can attempt to blend in with a picture of the Mona Lisa on a wall.

And death! What a concept. Another game saw death in a game like this for what it was; time wasted. In Among Us, when you die… I mean, you all know Among Us.

Still, when you are a human player in Among Us, you have chores to do. When you die in Among Us, you are now a ghost and you are still tasked with completing your random chores. Even though I spent a totality of hours doing dumb, boring chores on a ship on the off chance that could help my living team mates of winning, I was doing something, even it it was a distraction at best.

Meccha Chameleon does have an infection game mode where slain Chameleons become hunters. That’s not the most common game I’ve played. In my handful of hours playing so far the shot chameleons get to wait a few minutes while the game wraps up.

It’s an observer mode forced upon you by your blasted body and wasted hiding place. Boredom spurs the ambitious to change places and self-impose risk. Aptitude ensures the skilled can truly show off their ability to paint digitally. The mediocre, like myself, simply try their best, get shot, and wait.

Despite the power the paint program has, it is still rudimentary and imprecise. Those with the technique can do some truly remarkable work. They are an exception. For most, the painting tool is a clunky; an unwieldy fist clenching a paintbrush with enough force to cause a ferrule to crack. Even then, it’s incredibly fun to use.

My favourite part of this game is when I try to paint myself into the area around me. Taking the time to create a detailed patina of the planter behind me. Trying to recreate the woodgrain of the nearby bench. Spending the time to get the highlights of a detail just right. The hunter can go to hell. I am painting right now, and trying to get this crack in the marble recreated on my body such that maybe, MAYBE they won’t notice.

30 seconds later I am dead, and the painting is over.

It is the most engrossing, entertaining, and literally creative part of the game. At the same time as it is the genius that makes Meccha Chameleon the high point of this season of Friend games, it is a brutal thing when that is ripped from me in a gory splatter of garish paint. I was fiddling around with a leaf pattern and then some jackass comes by with a shotgun and puts me in timeout for at least a minute for daring to be a terrible a painter.

I suppose this as good a time as any to reflect that if I wanted to paint instead of play a game, I could and should. If I want to paint, there are better ways to do that; the problem is I want to play with my friends, and the best way to engage with the game is a subpar way to engage with one of my favourite hobbies. Meccha Chameleon is a mediocre game. It’s not a unique genre, and is in current and direct dialogue with a variety of other friendslop games like Burglin’ Gnomes, Schedule 1, and REPO. What makes it remarkable is this painting feature, creativity made about as manifest with tangible in-game benefit as is possible in any multiplayer game. Were it not for my friends though, this would be entirely missable. It is already something I tolerate more than enjoy for the sake of spending time with people I love.

If you enjoy painting with finnicky controls as a game type, I’d highly recommend trying GIMP as free software for this purpose. If an actual game is more your thing, might I recommend Passpartout: The Starving Artist? Excellent game, can’t recommend it enough for those who like the creative aspect of Meccha Chameleon but don’t want to deal with the… well you know. Everything else.