You pull Chameleon off the shelf and find yourself in a dark room with no instructions. I'm not telling you anything, so figure it out yourself. This is Kid Chameleon — originally sitting on the Mega Drive back in 1992 — and this SRAM version from 2021 is some kind of modern reincarnation of something that clearly doesn't know what it wants to be.

It's a game where you're a restless kid with the ability to change costumes and thus abilities. You jump across platforms, collect pieces of this world's strange stuff, transform into various things, and move on. It's classic nineties fare — non-linear exploration mixed with platforming, where your exit depends on which costume you grab. The concept itself isn't bad.

The graphics do their job — more like pencil on paper, pixelated, with no attempt at hipster retro. The sounds are there, they're loud, sometimes distracting, but they're not a disaster. It plays — movement is smooth, transforming into different things is straightforward, maps gradually open up. But every now and then you realize you've been wandering aimlessly for fifteen minutes, you've ventured into corners that give you nothing, and you're vaguely unsure what comes next. The designer clearly assumed you'd figure out where everything is yourself, but that's bordering on frustrating.

The original Kid Chameleon from 1992 was a shot on goal, an attempt to make platformers into something more. This 2021 attempt looks like it took the principles from the old thing and barely anything else. It's not a bad game, but there's no real reason to play it today instead of grabbing Kirby or Mega Man.

It's worth playing now only if you're curious how someone thirty years ago saw the platformer. It's not a waste of time, but it's not going to grab your heart either. The game knows what it wants to be, but that "what" might not be exactly what you want.