It's an unfortunate rite of passage nowadays for popular indie games to have their concept taken from them by ripoffs that are devoid of any real creativity. The latest casualty? Meccha Chameleon, which has now been pilferred by copycats across Steam, Fortnite, and Roblox.
The most egregious example, and the one that brought this to my attention (thanks GamesRadar), is Scribble Hunt, a game where you "paint the bunny man—a hide-and-seek where you blend in like a chameleon"—very subtle.
It's the same as Meccha Chameleon (but worse) in almost every way. You can hide in different poses and try to paint over your character as best you can to blend into the background. Meanwhile hunters with paint guns will try to find the hiders by shooting around at suspicious objects. Even the UI looks almost identical to Meccha Chameleon's, which is annoying because that's the only part I find slightly lacking in the OG game—but it's unlike any of these games to actually improve on the original concept.
The only real difference is the maps, which still look quite similar, and the models that have bunny ears instead of being plain clay figures. To top it all off, Scribble Bunny has an AI disclosure on its Steam page, which makes sense considering Meccha Chameleon came out barely a month ago, so Scribble Bunny has had a pretty tight turnaround.
But this isn't the only example of a Meccha Chameleon ripoff. There's Chameleon Hide and Seek in Fortnite and a slew of copycats in Roblox (the usual suspect) which include classics like Paint to Survive, Paint and Seek, Paint or DIE, and my personal favourite Paint or Oof.
We've seen the same thing happen to other popular indie games like REPO, which had a ripoff turn up on the Nintendo eShop, and Peak, with the devs going as far as to announce that they'd rather players pirate their game than play a "microtransaction Roblox slop ripoff". With it being increasingly hard for games to break through the white noise that is Steam, hit games are like gold dust to those who want to capitalise on it and make a quick buck. So, as always, I'd recommend checking out the real deal and joining the other 15 million people who've enjoyed Meccha Chameleon.
