The Lone Chameleon

The Lone Chameleon by Aminomad is a puzzle game created with RPG Maker MV where you guide a group of four colour-coded characters with individual abilities through a series of trials an unknown person set up for them as living experiments. Trapped in the mechanical menaces of these puzzle rooms, you slowly but surely discover each character's special powers and learn to use them in combination with each other to overcome increasingly complex challenges.

This game was apparently originally written in French and translated to English. While there are a few language errors here and there, the writing is generally good and not difficult to understand. The graphics are generally kept simple and to the point, which serves a puzzle game of this kind perfectly well. Sometimes, it can be a little difficult to remember which types of tiles have what effect, and the tutorials and instruction images aren't always entirely clear, but simply rereading them or experimenting a bit will usually be enough to help you grasp them.







The Lone Chameleon is advertised as a game with simple mechanics but complex puzzles using those mechanics. In my opinion, this is true for the most part, although I wouldn't necessarily call the all playable characters' abilities simple. And at the basic level, most of the player's tasks indeed simply involve cycling back and forth between the four characters to coordinate their actions. The goal of each room is always the same, but it's not as easy as it sounds. First, get all four characters onto their respectively coloured switches at the same time to open the door. Once that's done, though, you still have to get all characters through that door, which basically adds a second and often quite challenging phase to each puzzle.

Still sounds doable enough? Usually - after some thinking, planning, and a little bit of trial and error - it is. However, the regular addition of new types of tiles and additional party-wide powers make the game increasingly complicated, until you reach a point where the amount of mechanics to mind and steps to plan out becomes somewhat overwhelming. I very much enjoyed many of both the earlier and later puzzles, which are often a lot of fun to figure out and make you feel quite accomplished when you solve them. But towards the end of the game, even the very helpful addition of an undo function could not prevent me from feeling lost when faced with the sheer amount of possible moves.

The main problem of The Lone Chameleon is that some of its mechanics can work in obscure or unwieldly ways. Sometimes, the game doesn't explain certain relevant applications of your abilities very well, so you will have to figure them out on your own. For instance, the pink character's ability to assign colours to certain control panel tiles does not require you to assign all of those at once - you can abort the process after assigning only one or more tiles and figure the remaining ones out later. The fact that this is an option is not mentioned anywhere, but is pretty essential to making your planning much more doable.

In other cases, game mechanics are just unnecessarily complicated to use. Scrolling through your characters can only be done one character at a time, as opposed to having a button assigned to each character to access them directly. Other abilities require pressing two buttons as once, often using the same key in more than one combination. Though to be fair, this issue is excusable considering the game seems to have been optimised to be played with a controller rather than a keyboard.

Another instance of a gameplay feature that is especially cumbersome to use involves a power that allows seeing through solid obstacles to reveal passages or relevant tiles hidden behind them. While I personally liked both using and combining the different tools the game gives you to solve the puzzles, this ability turned out to be very annoying to me. Because you can only have your X-ray vision either turned on or off, and the information you need from one perspective is hard to discern when the other is active, you are forced to switch back and forth between the two states a lot. Not to mention that with the different heights and positions of characters and objects, the ability can become very confusing very quickly. And the game automatically switches back to normal vision when moving a character standing on an above-ground position, which is often more distracting than helpful. As a whole, unlike the other abilities you get to use, using this particular one generally felt more like a necessary chore instead of a rewarding way to cleverly solve a puzzle.











From the viewpoint of a player, however, The Lone Chameleon's biggest issue is the fact that some of its mechanics work in ways that are either unintuitive or don't make sense at all. The clearest example of this problem is the way the game works with the dimensions of height and depth in a 2-D environment. Generally, in a game with a top-down perspective like you usually find in RPG Maker, you would not expect two tiles that are obviously of different heights to be connected just because they are next to each other on the map, since even in a 2-D setting, the third dimension would have to be taken into account. Unfortunately, The Lone Chameleon neglects to do exactly this, creating situations where you need to utilise actually impossible space to solve a puzzle, since height and depth are not only not distinguished from each other, but the intended solution of a room requires you to work with this fact.
Of course, video games do not need to be hyper-realistic all the time, and can even mess with the laws of nature on purpose to allow the player to do things that would not be possible in the three-dimensional reality we live in. But especially in a puzzle game, it is of huge importance that the player is able to grasp what tools are available to them and what limits they have without ambiguity. An unusual and unintuitive aspect such as, in this case, being able and even required to ignore common spatial limitations should at least be mentioned and, if the creator wants to preserve any semblance of plausibility in their background story, be accompanied by a very good explanation.











All in all, I'd say that The Lone Chameleon is a neat puzzle game with a lot of interesting ideas and good gameplay for the most part. It does unfortunately get dragged down by some unwieldly or outright nonsensical design decisions and a somewhat overwhelming difficulty curve, which takes some of the fun out of what could have been a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Still, if you're looking for inspiraton on puzzle creation in RPG Maker, this game provides a lot of interesting examples.
All that I need to add at the end is that according to its game page, an improved, expanded version of The Lone Chameleon has been released on Steam recently. I can only wish the creator best of luck with this and any future endeavours, and hope that this new build of the game addresses some of the problems I encountered playing the RMN version.