How to play "MECCHA CHAMELEON": Complete explanation of MECCHA CHAMELEON gameplay system and coloring camouflage mechanism

"MECCHA CHAMELEON" is a standard turn-based confrontation. At the beginning of each round, the players in the room will be divided into two sides: the Hiding Party (Chameleon) with a larger number of people and the Searching Party (Ghost / Oni / Hunter) with a smaller number of people. The rhythm of a game can be roughly broken down into four stages. If you understand this rhythm, you will know what to do every second.

1. Team: The system assigns who hides and who catches according to the current mode. In infection and other modes, this identity will also change during the game (more details below).
2. Preparation stage: The hiding party is put into the scene to move around freely, chooses the hiding spot, paints the body, and finally locks in a pose. At this time, the searching party is locked up at the birth point and cannot see the scene, leaving time for the hiding party to set up.
3. Manhunt phase: Once the preparation time is up, the search party is released and begins to find and "hit" all the hiders one by one within the time limit.
4. Post-game reveal: After the timer expires, the settlement screen will reveal each hider’s hiding location and disguise one by one. According to feedback from many media and community players, this is often the funniest part of every game. Seeing someone paint themselves into a banana or a balloon and slump in the corner makes the whole audience laugh.

What needs to be said honestly is that the how many seconds each of the preparation phase and the search phase last, the official has not announced the specific number, and it is likely to change with the mode and the homeowner's settings. According to the general knowledge of Hide and Seek / Prop Hunt, the preparation period is usually only a few tens of seconds, which is enough for you to select points and rough paint, but not enough for you to elaborate, so efficiency is very important: first fix the point, then pose, and finally paint. The total duration of a game is configured by the host for each game. It will end when the search party catches everyone or the countdown reaches zero. Maps and modes are selected by the host in the lobby. For specific scenes, see Scenes and Maps.

Coloring and camouflage is the soul that distinguishes "MECCHA CHAMELEON" from all traditional hide-and-seek games. Your chameleon starts out as a pure white body. After opening the coloring menu in the preparation stage, you can color various parts of the body with your own hands to match the walls, floors, paintings or props around you. This is not about picking a skin from several presets, but true freehand drawing: you can fit the pattern of the floor tiles, copy the texture of the wall, and flatten the body against the wall to imitate a hanging painting or a bulletin board.

This means that every disguise is unique, and success or failure depends entirely on your eyesight and hand speed. MECCHA CHAMELEON's official Steam store page summarizes the three winning factors as "the hiding spot, the pose, and above all, your artistic skills". In other words, whether the color is right, whether there are light and dark levels, and whether the outline is similar or not, determines life and death more than which corner you hide in.

Two basic understandings for novices: First, Don’t just use one solid color for flat painting. A real surface has a light-receiving surface and a shadow surface, so a single flat color is the most conspicuous flaw in the eyes of the investigators. Second, Prioritize color accuracy over fine strokes. According to media reviews, the early version did not have brush size options and the coloring resolution was limited. Instead of worrying about detailed lines, it is better to lay out the main color in large blocks first. Specific layering techniques and practical techniques for color matching according to the surface are organized in Hiding and Camouflage Techniques.

The core of the coloring operation is the color palette UI. What the official and wiki can confirm is that the color adjustment interface provides color wheel plus RGB value, which allows you to intuitively drag with the color wheel and accurately lock a color with the three values ​​​​of red, green and blue. Additionally, some media reviews mention that HSV (hue/saturation/value) sliders are available.

Beyond this, the community guide also describes a few more advanced things: saveable swatches/color themes, and a set of Metallicity/Roughness (gloss) sliders to control how the surface of the body reflects light. It should be reminded that the glossy slider is a rumor circulated by community players, and the official and mainstream media have not yet confirmed its exact existence. But even so, the idea of ​​"gloss must match the environment" is true: if a reflective and shiny body is attached to a matte wall, no matter how accurate the color is, it will instantly wear through. This is also the most easily overlooked advancement point for novices.

The key tool that can really speed up your color matching is the confirmed existence of the Eyedropper tool "スポイト / Spoid". It is a 3D color-picking straw that can pick up the exact color directly from the walls, floors, and prop surfaces around you. The original Japanese media wrote "zhou囲の色からスポイトで色をpickupうこともpossible" (you can also use the straw to pick colors from the surrounding colors). The media compared it to Photoshop's straw. The standard practice in practice is: first use a straw to absorb a portion of the basic main color of the current surface, then a portion of the darker shadow color, then fill in a large area, and finally add texture. However, PC Gamer's review also pointed out that this color picking tool is "a little weird". Sometimes the color picking is not smooth enough, which will limit what you can imitate in a limited time, so don't bet all your time on a perfect color pick.

Getting the colors right isn't enough, because the chameleon is a bipedal humanoid, and the upright silhouette itself will give you away. The function of the Posture system is to break the outline of the human form and allow your body to blend into the scene at the silhouette level.

According to media reports and community compilation, currently known examples of postures include: curling up into a ball (such as pretending to be a balloon or a round prop), squatting, lying flat, and flattening against the wall (flattening the body against the wall to imitate hanging paintings or bulletin boards). The wall-sticking posture also has a dedicated "unstick-to-wall" button to facilitate you to readjust it. The v1.2.0 update adds 2 more poses. The total number of postures has not been officially announced. What can be confirmed is that the number is still increasing.

There is an important sequence in the workflow: pose first, then paint. The reason is very intuitive. Once the body changes its posture, the surface facing the camera and the parts that are stretched or squashed will change. What you want to paint is actually "those surfaces that can be seen by the arresting party in the current posture." If you paint it first and then pose it, the color and light and shade may be misaligned. When choosing a pose, you also need to make the silhouette match the nearby objects: if you want to pretend to be a balloon, curl it up; if you want to pretend to hang a painting or an exit sign, flatten it against the wall. How to choose a posture and how to correct the silhouette, please see Hiding Tips for details.

Switch to the hunter side (Ghost/Oni/Hunter) and the gameplay is completely different. The search party scanned the scene from a first-person perspective. Without a flashlight, they relied solely on their naked eyes to identify flaws in the disguise. After discovering the target, hit the opponent with a gun to eliminate the opponent. The official text states "见つけたプレイヤーは、铳で撃たれるとアウトになる" (players who are discovered will be eliminated if they are hit by a gun).

Because there is no such aid as a flashlight, what the search party really needs to practice is the ability to "see flaws". No matter how well-painted the disguise is, it will often be revealed in these places:

• Spacing and symmetry: There is an extra object that should not be there, or there is suddenly one more or one less object in a row of symmetrical objects.
• Gloss and Shadow: The reflection or shadow of the body does not match the surrounding material.
• Edge: The border of the color block is too clean, too regular, or does not connect with the background texture.
• "Too central/too clean": Objects placed in the center of the room that are too complete are often players.

The correct strategy for the search party is to conduct systematic inspections in separate areas and slowly inspect along the edge of the wall, rather than rushing in blindly. The hiding spots revealed at the end of each round are also the best learning tool for the hunter. Remembering the high-frequency hiding spots will make the next round more efficient. The complete search ideas and detection list are in Seaker Guide.

In addition to selecting a map in the lobby, the homeowner also needs to select a mode. "MECCHA CHAMELEON" is currently confirmed to have three modes. The official Japanese original name is attached below for your convenience to compare in the interface.

A reminder: the English names (Normal / Increasing / Double) in the above table come from the wiki and community compilation. Only the Japanese "Normal / 嗗え鬼 / ダブル" is confirmed in the official store and patch text . The English translation is subject to the community usage. The number of people suitable for different modes is different. 2 to 4 people are suitable for the normal mode, and 6 to 10 people are more suitable for the infection mode. For details on team size and house building, see Online and Multiplayer.

Starting from the v1.2.0 update, "MECCHA CHAMELEON" has added a points ranking system, which is the official update content. Its design is very clever and captures the essence of the game: points given to hiders are calculated "according to the distance and length of time you stay in the sight of the hunter". In other words, the closer and longer you stay in the sight of the raiding party without being caught, the higher the points you get.

This rule elevates the gameplay from simply "hide and don't move" to "dare to perform in front of your eyes." A hider who perfectly blends himself into the wall and stands unharmed on the path that the searchers must pass will be more rewarded than a person who hides in the darkest corner and survives to the end. This is why what many masters pursue is not "hide until no one can find me", but "I am clearly right in front of you, but you don't recognize me."

On the other side, the system has also prepared Missed Spot / Missed Enemies for the hunting parties, which will list the hiding spots and enemies that you have not found in this round to help you check for missed spots and fill in the gaps. This feature added a "display or not" switch in v1.2.1, and a button to hide it was added in v1.2.2 (convenient for players who don't want to be exposed to spoilers to turn it off). It should be noted that the specific scoring formula has not been officially announced yet. The weight of distance and duration is not clear to the outside world, so I will not guess the exact value here.

Many players come from the Prop Hunt (Prop Hunt) lineage of "Team Fortress 2" or Garry's Mod. The fastest way to understand "MECCHA CHAMELEON" is to see the fundamental difference between it and the classic Prop Hunt.

In a traditional Prop Hunt, the hiding party will turn into a preset prop (a box, a chair, a pumpkin). What you can choose is to turn into a ready-made item in the library, and it is often equipped with a taunt taunt to expose yourself for fun. In MECCHA CHAMELEON, youalways keep your humanoid body and blend into the environmentby freely painting and posing, rather than replacing it with a fixed model. This design choice has two direct consequences: first, each disguise is unique, and the upper limit depends on your art skills rather than the prop library; second, the focus of the gameplay has shifted from "finding the most similar prop and hiding it" to "drawing and posing like yourself."

About props and skills: According to existing official and media sources, this game can basically be judged as having no props, buffs or consumables in the traditional sense (This is based on the inference that "no source proves their existence", which is a consensus level among the community and media, and is not an official official statement). The only "tools" in your hands are the color palette, straws, posture menu, and the hunter's gun used to eliminate people. It is a pure camouflage skill-based gameplay with no equipment build or card draw value. The chance of winning depends entirely on your vision and creativity.