“Portal with paint” was how my editor described ChromaGun to me, and he wasn’t wrong. Every part of its aesthetic, from the pale laboratory walls to the test-chamber progression, screams homage to Valve’s classic. There’s even a cake joke right at the end. And while this could easily cause eye rolls, ChromaGun soon shows itself to be a worthy puzzle game with its own rules and logic that will challenge you just to the edge of giving up.
The sign of a good puzzle game is that just-right difficulty. Too hard and you’ll never play the thing again, too easy and you’ll lose all respect for it. For the most part, ChromaGun rides the middle of this wave, leading you from simple puzzles designed to teach you the basics of colour mixing and orb behaviour, through to some real head-scratchers that push against the boundary of too difficult/obtuse.
Basically, every chamber is about getting one, or several, coloured orbs to hover above little light pads that then allow doors to open. This is done via an attraction mechanic that sees the orbs float, gravity-like, towards walls of the same colour as them – so, blue orbs get pulled to blue walls but not red walls, and so on. Sometimes the doors lead to another part of the chamber, revealing a multi-part puzzle, while other times it just opens to door that leads to the next chamber. Whenever a new concept is added to the mix, there are two or three easy chambers that introduce the mechanic and then the difficulty gets ramped up. This structure falls apart a bit towards the end of the 50 chambers, and I found myself increasingly frustrated by new mechanics that just weren’t explained to me. For example, several of the last chambers feature wall panels that reflect whichever colour you shoot at them, but this was not made clear and I only learned it after watching a solution via YouTube.
You wouldn’t think that shooting yellow, blue and red blobs of paint would make for very interesting puzzles, but ChromaGun is a surprisingly deep title. It took me a good while to get through it, most of that time spent on trial-and-error moments trying to work out how to open the damn doors. Depth comes from continuously introduced mechanics, such as colour mixing, orbs that chase you aggressively, walls that self-clean after a few seconds, electric floor pads that kill orbs that float over them, and floor bumps that add new tether points for orbs.
There are lots of interesting moments, such as building tether paths to lead orbs across entire sections or needing to quickly mix colours on the fly, sometimes even changing the colours of the orbs themselves so that they go where you want them to. Things never reach the genius levels of Portal, but they certainly aren’t simple, and the concept is worthy of a full game.
I played ChromaGun both docked and handheld and found the experience to be equal for both. There was some frame-rate slow down for both during general play, but nothing that affected gameplay too much. The game’s engine is sparse but slick and there’s a section towards the end where everything goes dark and things take on a cool reflected-light look that was quite atmospheric. Some Switch-specific controls would have been nice, though, such as motion aiming. I found the sections that required quick aiming a little frustrating and couldn’t quite get the sensitivity settings right. Motion aiming such as seen in Skyrim would have helped things feel more natural. Overall, though, I found this a fun, challenging and worthwhile title.
ChromaGun is a decent puzzler that plays off its Portal inspiration yet manages to deliver a unique take on chamber-style gameplay. It stretches the idea of primary colours out nicely and offers many hours of experimental gameplay.
Rating: 3.5 / 5
Discounts on hardware, games and accessories