Chameleon Hideout

Each round of Chameleon Hideout starts with a card that tells you your role, Hider, and a Play button. Then you are dropped into a cosy low-poly living room as a plain grey block figure: a brown leather sofa, a dresser with a lamp, a wall clock, a framed painting, a bookcase, armchairs and a pink rug over a beige floor. A few other hiders with names like Wall_Mask, Palette_Pro and Brush_Master are scattered around, and a counter in the top-left corner counts down Hunter arrives in from roughly twenty seconds.

Those twenty seconds are the whole game. Press T, or click the Color Studio button, and a painting panel slides in. It has a colour wheel, a swatch of the selected colour and three tools: a brush for painting by hand, a fill bucket that floods a whole part of your body, and a pipette that samples any colour you click in the room. Pick the pipette, click the rug, switch to fill, click your torso, and that part of you turns rug pink. There is a Clear painting button for mistakes and an Apply button to lock the result in. Then you need to be standing where that colour actually is.

When the counter hits zero the hunter, Seeker-9000, starts sweeping the room. A kill feed in the corner reports each catch, and when it finds you a Found card shows your survival time and a leaderboard of everyone in the round. In our first try only one of three body parts was painted and we lasted 31 seconds, while three of the other hiders lasted the full 120.

The lesson arrives fast. Half a match is no match; the fill tool works part by part, so a convincing disguise means sampling and filling several areas, then parking yourself against the exact surface you copied and not moving. Rounds are short, so trying a new spot or a new colour scheme costs very little.