It’s surprisingly terrifying, being a lantern. You’re bright, you’re prominent, and you’re hanging right above everybody else’s heads, where it would take less than a second of serious scrutiny—or a moment’s reflection that the lampposts in Meccha Chameleon usually only have two lights hanging off of them, not three—to be caught out and shot. And yet, as I hung through a whole round of the new online hide-and-seek game as the bright yellow lamp shining out over my seeking hunters’ heads, I felt the hider’s ultimate thrill: A sneaky-mean sense of getting one over on everybody else. You fools! I’m right fucking here!
Let’s be clear: Meccha Chameleon, recently released on Steam, and now overtaking Twitch’s streamer charts, is the product of a two-person team, and feels like it. (Among other things, the game’s review page is awash right now with accusations that bad actors are using its mod support to infect incautious players’ computers with malware, so caveat emptor on that count.) The maps are full of obvious pre-made asset store trash, the controls are almost deliberately clunky—oh, of course you hold down Alt and Mouse 1 to do something as mind-blowingly complex as rotating your camera—and the interface is so bare-bones you can practically see marrow dripping out of it.
But, in the tradition of great indie games from numerous eras, the core idea hiding underneath all these demerits also shines through so brightly that the game transcends easy accusations of quickly made “friendslop,” and has become something I think about even when I’m far from my PC. “What if I hid myself as the rider on a big golden horse statue?” I find myself wondering, important thoughts ticking through my brain in the black silence of the night.
Existing in the tradition of games like Garry’s Mod mainstay Prop Hunt (and, uh, hide and seek, a game of such ubiquity that children in pretty much every culture in human history have come up with a version of it), Meccha Chameleon has two big interesting ideas powering it. The first is the obvious one: When you’re dropped (in the form of what I annoyingly insisted on describing to my wife as “a bathroom sign man”) into one of its various cluttered environments, you’re given a pretty robust set of paint tools that allow you to change your coloring in drastic ways. (Hence the Chameleon part of the title.)
With an eyedropper tool that lets you copy colors from the environment, and the ability to create two clones of your body to break up your basic stickman profile, these paint tools are not only robust, but impose a skill ceiling on the game. In less lofty terms, that means you know when you’re doing a shitty job with them, and can usually see the path toward doing a less shitty job—provided you’re not sitting right in the eyeline of a hunter who’s going to notice any second that that “balloon” in the corner of the room has a big unpainted white splotch on its ass.
The other great idea at work here is more subtle, and speaks to the way a single design decision or rule can massively alter and improve an existing game. See, to score points in Meccha Chameleon, you have to be seen—as paradoxical as that might seem. The game keeps a running tally of “missed spots” for every player on the hiding side, counting every time a hunting player’s camera has crossed over them without the critical (and lethal) moment of “Ah-ha!” setting in. So, sure, you can shove yourself under a couch in a dark corner, paint yourself like the floor, and probably make it through the round bored, but alive. But if you want to actually hit the leaderboard, you need to put yourself out there and be daring, an incentive that encourages players to paint themselves into obvious high-visibility spots like paintings or pieces of graffiti, or—my preferred tactic—employ mimicry to trick people’s eyes into dismissing what is often a pretty rough effort to appear as just one more doll in a room that’s been haphazardly filled with them.
It’s this aspect that’s really engaged my curiosity, and had me looking around this week at actual academic research on hide and seek itself, a surprisingly robust topic of psychological and sociological study. Besides stumbling across a cute little study suggesting rats can be trained to both understand and enjoy the rules of the game (the phrase “joy jumps” delightfully appears), the research also suggests hide and seek keeps cropping up throughout our history because it teaches children something profoundly important: The skill of imagining what other people are seeing and thinking. (“Theory of mind,” in cognitive science speech.) And that’s the biggest pleasure of Meccha Chameleon, to me: Imagining the eyes of my hunters, either narrowing in on my obvious fuckups, or, ideally, glossing over as I hide myself in the bright white of a car’s headlight. (“People don’t naturally look directly at light sources in video games” being one of those things I’ve learned pretty quickly about human psychology in my short time with the game.)
Even foregoing the big “all friends” games that seem to be the game’s norm, and instead playing with rooms full of random strangers, there’s something funny, thrilling, and connecting about seeing the ways people try to trick each other’s eyes and minds. I might revel in that slightly mean-spirited sense of fooling my opponents, but that very feeling is also rooted in understanding their brains well enough to pull the trick. Given how often video games can often feel like direct attacks on our capacity for empathy, other human beings reduced to simple threats or targets, there’s something incredibly refreshing about a goofy little game like this, where the only way to win is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
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