Meccha Chameleon

On friendslop

I'm usually late to the bandwagon on the genre that has recently come to be known as 'friendslop.' Perhaps what was known as 'party games' in pre-COVID times, the naming of 'friendslop' could be interpreted as derogatory (low-effort, low-budget, devoid of deeper meaning) but I think it was originally meant as a good thing. Friendslop games are generally easy to understand, easy to operate, and most importantly, easy to convince your entire friend group to buy.

The downside of friendslop is that you really have to be there, lest you get FOMO, or worse, log in too late and the servers are empty. Tell the truth: When is the last time you and your friends booted up Among Us?...

The unlikely origins of Meccha Chameleon

So anyway, I'm very glad to have caught this one in the moment, because Meccha Chameleon really is a brilliant little game. It's mainly notable for being made by basically two random guys in just 2 months, and for hitting 15 million in sales in less than half that time. FYI, I'll be peppering this review with screenshots from games my friends and I played. Let me know if you can spot us!

The game is a clear descendant of older games like Prop Hunt -- a notable mod from Garry's Mod though I mainly know it from Team Fortress 2 -- evidenced by the hunter role requiring the use of a shotgun to 'find' hidden players. But the unique spin, and what essentially made this game go viral, is the ability to paint oneself into an infinite number of funny backgrounds and clever custom maps.

A few caveats

The hunter movement uses standard FPS controls. The painting controls, however, take some time to get used to. When painting mode is activated (the F key), the interface stays on screen, because it's so complex that you'll definitely need it to remember all the controls. One wrong keystroke can ruin your positioning, so being deliberate about using the controls is necessary.

The game settings and UI are probably best described as janky. The game modes are pretty poorly explained and the "likes" you can reward players for great disguises are inexplicably called "eeyans," which I had to look up. Eeyan is a phrase from the Kansai dialect of Japanese, an accent from the Osaka area that is often translated to English as a southern US accent to convey its unique lilting sing-songish-ness. Lotta Hart from the Phoenix Wright games is a good example of this. Anyway, this is all to say, eeyan is not a phrase your average English speaker would know, so it's just a funny artifact left in from localization. Intentional or not, I don't know.

What's brilliant about this game

Enough complaining about the controls. You'll get used to them, I promise. What makes this game so extensive and replayable is how it ties in with Steam Workshop, which functions as a library of player-created maps. One of my friend group's favorites is the art gallery, where players can paint themselves into famous paintings. What's smart about this is that there is virtually endless variety in hiding spots, which gives the game tons of replayability and gives content creators a path to creating tons of unique content.

Audio

Oh, um. Yeah, I guess this game has audio. Come to think of it, it does have music, though it sounds more or less like someone playing a 10 second MIDI loop from Runescape from like 2 rooms away. Audio is definitely an afterthought but it actually doesn't matter much since you're likely to be playing with voice chat anyway.

What I learned

I think the important thing to take away from Meccha Chameleon as a game developer is that despite the news and hype cycles around billion-dollar AAA releases or publisher layoffs or AI or whatever, it's still worth making games that have a strong yet simple premise that anyone can enjoy. Anyone can look at 5-second Reel about this game and immediately understand how it works. There's no open world explore, no deep story to care about, no complicated mechanics to learn. Just pure fun.