Sometimes even the most “unga bunga” neanderthals need to hang up their clubs and put their thinking caps on for some enrichment activities. That’s the sort of mindset I found myself in when booting up ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard. It’s a first-person puzzle shooter from German dev Pixel Maniacs with some DNA from the likes of Portal, mainly the central concept of being a test subject in an overly sterile and corporatized setting, audibly hounded by a voice in the walls commenting on your every move. Is everything as simple at is appears? It rarely is, reader.
ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard takes place around 10 seconds after the first ChromaGun game’s end, a fact that’s made clear in a humorous way in the game’s first couple minutes as you’re surveyed by the CEO of the fictional ChromaTec company, Richard Gearhart II. In our reality, it’s been 10 years almost to the day since the first game’s release, another fact that’s commented on in a fourth wall-cracking moment before you’re subjected to even more testing of your own will… right?
Richard swindles you with a promise of freedom and activates a trap door plunging you into deep depths of the ChromaTec facility for continued testing. In the fall, the tricolor ChromaGun you were carrying from ChromaGun1 breaks because some diligent employee forgot to place the fall-breaking mat underneath the pit. Imagine your knees being pushed up into your lungs from a big fall and now you walk around like a penguin all because someone had to take a smoke break.
You get a new ChromaGun only capable of shooting yellow paint and begin learning about the game’s foundational tenets. Splat certain objects like a hovering ball called a WorkerDroid, desk, or box with a color and it becomes curiously attracted to panels of the same color. In-universe, this is called Magnetoid Chromatism. Objects can be tethered to multiple other things in its line of sight and range which makes for clever puzzle-solving where you have to strike tug-of-war balances between areas to activate buttons or meet other requirements since you are the most emaciated ChromaTec tester and cannot physically move the objects yourself.
Protip: do the opposite of whatever weird rules you come across like this
Throughout ChromaGun 2‘s first chapter, I’m immediately reminded of Mirror’s Edge, not because of its mechanics or structure so much as its deceptively vibrant design and dependence on eye-catching color. Yellow paint as a hand-holding concept in other types of games carries some controversy, but here it’s capable of eliciting elation and revelation when you have that big brain ‘eureka’ moment in a puzzle room. Plus, it’s just pretty to paint with bright primary colors!
Soon enough at the end of Chapter 1, you’re tasked with activating a portal deep in the core of ChromaTec and venturing through it to find a fully kitted-out ChromaGun in an alternate universe, one with untold, arcane power: three colors. This is where ChromaGun 2 really starts to flex its muscles not only as a sequel, but as an extension on Pixel Maniacs’ creativity, nuance, and variety, finally realized after a decade of conceptualization and improved implementation.
Chapter 2 brings you to a whole new universe, though one that will functionally and structurally be familiar to the first chapter. There’s balls, there’s walls, there’s paint, and the disembodied voice–except it’s considerably more feminine and British compared to Richard’s. Her name is Mildred and she’s a fair amount more malevolent than the last guy, surely not a portention for the rest of the story, right? You quickly get what you’re after, a functional ChromaGun with yellow, red, and blue to mix at will, along with the very, very helpful ability to erase paint you place on objects back to its default color or a blank canvas. There’s even a Bob Ross-referencing achievement for erasing paint from a single object several times–don’t ask me how I know.
Your success in this game is dependent on your ability to recall color mixing to make other colors. Thankfully, if you don’t remember your elementary school art class, there’s a handy, simple color wheel present at all times on the pause screen in the bottom-right corner. Forget how to make green? Take a peek, feel dumb for approximately seven seconds, then trek on by squirting some yellow and blow together–voila. At least you’re not judged for how many times you hit pause to remind yourself. (I promise, most of my pauses were for bathroom breaks and you literally can’t prove otherwise).
I think we’ve all applied for worse jobs out there
Puzzles range from ones that click with a confident immediacy, to ones that are deceptively complicated. As time went on for me, it seemed the more limited the parts, the more complex thinking I had to do, but it was never insurmountable. Rooms with only a few paintable panels and one droid to maneuver were often kicking my ass (and brain) for around 30 minutes. Make the WorkerDroids that chase you hover right where you need them, use the environment to your benefit, and one tip that proved helpful was to remember to experiment with erasing color as much as you do painting it.
Soon enough, you’re asked to get in a little mischief. You’re going where you’re not supposed to go (so says your sadistic, snarky overseers) and taking peeks behind curtains to lift the façade of the tests. People are not who they initially seem and their motives are not pure of heart. Luckily, yours are, and all you want is to get back to your realm, even if it means threatening the known fabrics of the universes.
The sense of accomplishment you feel exacerbates as time goes on. Since I usually play more action- or adventure-oriented games with comparatively basic puzzles if any, ChromaGun 2 was a legitimate mental workout and break from what I’m used to. Even when you finally solve a puzzle and think “…really?” to yourself in incredulity at how simple the solution ended up being, you bring with you knowledge to take onto the next puzzles. The light bulbs we’re going off so much over my own head, I fear for my next electricity bill, but no matter, I’ll be invoicing Pixel Maniacs for the difference.
There is also a fair amount of platforming later on. It’s required so you have to get comfortable with jumping and manipulating platforms and the environment in general to get to where you need to be. It’s never too punishing and overall not bad thanks to rock solid controls and anyone with a familiarity with first-person games where you have to navigate complex areas will do just fine. You can’t even sprint or crouch so there’s a lot less factors at play than most other games with platforming can have.
I’m sure there’s a very good reason why this was hidden in the walls of the testing facility
It’s all quite relaxing too. In spite of the voices prodding and teasing you from time to time, there’s a serenity to it all. Just you, paint, and a lovely ambient soundtrack that sometimes veers into more energetic fare like the ultra popular Allegro movement from Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik serenade. (You know the one, good painting music.) Humming synthesizers warm and massage the mind during most puzzles with more action-oriented areas like ones where you’re being chased by single-minded WorkerDroids having bolder music with splashing drums and driving rhythms in addition to melodic synths to give the game a more cinematic feel.
For those that like a little deviation, there’s optional trinkets to collect in the form of golden ChromaGuns. They don’t affect gameplay in any way that I could tell, they seem like pure collectibles for the fun of it. Depending on the size of the puzzle area, there would be one to a few of them to find and you always know how many due to badges being visible when paused in-game and on the level selection menu. My motivation to find each one was low, but I did happen across 20 of the total 58 by the time I finished ChromaGun 2. One of the toughest puzzles I found in Chapter 2 was a maze-like formation where you had to shift three different droids onto switches to open a door that took me over 30 minutes. I thought it was required to progress. Nope, turns out what was behind the door was a golden ChromaGun. Thanks?
Maybe you’re wondering, “this all sounds great, but for a game so dependent on color, it seems limiting to those who can’t see color like most do,” and I’m here to say that the developer thought of that and then some. Pixel Maniacs went to great lengths to make their colorblind mode more than an afterthought or tacked-on feature to satisfy basic accessibility. The Settings menu even says, “We’re kinda proud of it tbh,” when you select their colorblind mode which includes distinct shapes on top of the primary and mixed colors in the world. I imagine learning how to mix shapes is a bit more complicated than colors, but the option is there. There’s also audio cues to play with and adaptable controls, though I did not experiment with those.
This is a good time to mention the default controls and look sensitivities felt great to me. Your fingers aren’t tripping over themselves to accomplish feats to finish puzzles, you’re never forced to set new actions-per-minute records to progress. In fact, when you start a new game, the first message you see before you’re brought into ChromaGun 2‘s world is a promise that you’ll never need to have quick reflexes to progress through the game. This is mostly true from my experience. Some puzzles do require specific timing to nail the solution in the intended way, or at least my way, but it’s nothing most people couldn’t accomplish with some practice. Since you can never die in ChromaGun 2 (the attack drones are all bark, no bite), the demand and anxiety are both low. Take your time, plot things out, remember the color wheel, be okay with being wrong, and you’ll be enjoying your time with this game.
You grow to love these little guys after a while
I do have critiques though. When I was around midway through the game, I found the characters starting to grate a bit. Both Richard and Mildred are good motivators as antagonists, their writing and performances are solid, but not as memorable as other contemporaries or their influences. It wasn’t until Chapter 4 when I started to come back around on them, and Chapter 5 gives plenty of opportunities for them to shine more as characters when universes twist and break under the weight of the game’s premise, and I unfortunately do mean that literally at certain points.
My biggest complaint with ChromaGun 2 is one that hopefully others don’t have to experience. While there are some little technical issues here and there that don’t particularly detract from the enjoyment (for instance, assets like paint waterfalls clip in and out sometimes, or a couple typos in the subtitles), I did encounter some softlocking that prevented me from progressing in Chapter 5. In the segment titled “Interdimensional Space Station,” I accidentally got a droid stuck between a horizontal moving platform and solid floor twice, unable to move either back into place forcing me to restart. In “Chromamaché Paperworks,” an otherwise very charming level where everything’s made of cardboard, I had to restart three times to get its moving parts working ideally. Elevator lifts became desynched which got me stuck in a cardboard prison, and a couple triggers at the very end of the level wouldn’t, well, trigger, forcing me to restart again two separate times.
Luckily, none of these issues were big time losses, but they’re all issues that should be patched out if possible to avoid frustration. Mid-level checkpointing could also be implemented to help ease problems like this if they can’t be reliably fixed, but I understand how that could prove difficult given some puzzle layouts.
Beating ChromaGun 2 was awesome, a great climax of a build-up that perhaps started a little too late. The experimental and frankly wacky aspects of the game are so charming and genuinely interesting enough to curve your lips into a smirk regularly, but mostly kept for the final chapter. While it’s quite substantial and long, the game could have avoided a soggier midsection with less in-fighting of the antagonists and initiating the explorative and fun aspects and settings of the game sooner. I appreciate slow burns and setting up your world and plot with some details and deliberation, but the pacing felt off to me as a result.
You’ll find some satirically dystopian corpospeak littered around the universes of ChromaGun 2
Still, it’s all nothing a little paint thinner couldn’t help fix! It’s hard not to recommend ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard, so of course I will. The puzzles are satisfying, I felt immense satisfaction working within (and out of) its boundaries, and now I feel like I could apply to be in Mensa. The places it goes, literally and figuratively, are things I haven’t seen done in a game like this before. I’d hate to spoil any of the key moments so I won’t, suffice to say they all work incredibly well, from the easter egg references to other games and media, to things from Pixel Maniacs’ own creative minds. It was truly an adventure, spanning worlds, colors, textures, matter, just about anything you could think of.
ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard gets a big recommendation for those who like to think their ways into trouble and have their persistence and own creativity rewarded with something unique that helps push the genre forward.
It’s hard not to recommend ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard. The puzzles are satisfying, I felt immense satisfaction working within (and out of) its boundaries, and now I feel like I could apply to be in Mensa. The places it goes, literally and figuratively, are things I haven’t seen done in a game like this before. I’d hate to spoil any of the key moments so I won’t, suffice to say they all work incredibly well, from the easter egg references to other games and media, to things from Pixel Maniacs’ own creative minds.
Sometimes even the most “unga bunga” neanderthals need to hang up their clubs and put their thinking caps on for some enrichment activities. That’s the sort of mindset I found myself in when booting up ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard. It’s a first-person puzzle shooter from German dev Pixel Maniacs with some DNA from the likes of Portal, mainly the central concept of being a test subject in an overly sterile and corporatized setting, audibly hounded by a voice in the walls commenting on your every move. Is everything as simple at is appears? It rarely is, reader.
ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard takes place around 10 seconds after the first ChromaGun game’s end, a fact that’s made clear in a humorous way in the game’s first couple minutes as you’re surveyed by the CEO of the fictional ChromaTec company, Richard Gearhart II. In our reality, it’s been 10 years almost to the day since the first game’s release, another fact that’s commented on in a fourth wall-cracking moment before you’re subjected to even more testing of your own will… right?
Richard swindles you with a promise of freedom and activates a trap door plunging you into deep depths of the ChromaTec facility for continued testing. In the fall, the tricolor ChromaGun you were carrying from ChromaGun1 breaks because some diligent employee forgot to place the fall-breaking mat underneath the pit. Imagine your knees being pushed up into your lungs from a big fall and now you walk around like a penguin all because someone had to take a smoke break.
You get a new ChromaGun only capable of shooting yellow paint and begin learning about the game’s foundational tenets. Splat certain objects like a hovering ball called a WorkerDroid, desk, or box with a color and it becomes curiously attracted to panels of the same color. In-universe, this is called Magnetoid Chromatism. Objects can be tethered to multiple other things in its line of sight and range which makes for clever puzzle-solving where you have to strike tug-of-war balances between areas to activate buttons or meet other requirements since you are the most emaciated ChromaTec tester and cannot physically move the objects yourself.
Protip: do the opposite of whatever weird rules you come across like this
Throughout ChromaGun 2‘s first chapter, I’m immediately reminded of Mirror’s Edge, not because of its mechanics or structure so much as its deceptively vibrant design and dependence on eye-catching color. Yellow paint as a hand-holding concept in other types of games carries some controversy, but here it’s capable of eliciting elation and revelation when you have that big brain ‘eureka’ moment in a puzzle room. Plus, it’s just pretty to paint with bright primary colors!
Soon enough at the end of Chapter 1, you’re tasked with activating a portal deep in the core of ChromaTec and venturing through it to find a fully kitted-out ChromaGun in an alternate universe, one with untold, arcane power: three colors. This is where ChromaGun 2 really starts to flex its muscles not only as a sequel, but as an extension on Pixel Maniacs’ creativity, nuance, and variety, finally realized after a decade of conceptualization and improved implementation.
Chapter 2 brings you to a whole new universe, though one that will functionally and structurally be familiar to the first chapter. There’s balls, there’s walls, there’s paint, and the disembodied voice–except it’s considerably more feminine and British compared to Richard’s. Her name is Mildred and she’s a fair amount more malevolent than the last guy, surely not a portention for the rest of the story, right? You quickly get what you’re after, a functional ChromaGun with yellow, red, and blue to mix at will, along with the very, very helpful ability to erase paint you place on objects back to its default color or a blank canvas. There’s even a Bob Ross-referencing achievement for erasing paint from a single object several times–don’t ask me how I know.
Your success in this game is dependent on your ability to recall color mixing to make other colors. Thankfully, if you don’t remember your elementary school art class, there’s a handy, simple color wheel present at all times on the pause screen in the bottom-right corner. Forget how to make green? Take a peek, feel dumb for approximately seven seconds, then trek on by squirting some yellow and blow together–voila. At least you’re not judged for how many times you hit pause to remind yourself. (I promise, most of my pauses were for bathroom breaks and you literally can’t prove otherwise).
I think we’ve all applied for worse jobs out there
Puzzles range from ones that click with a confident immediacy, to ones that are deceptively complicated. As time went on for me, it seemed the more limited the parts, the more complex thinking I had to do, but it was never insurmountable. Rooms with only a few paintable panels and one droid to maneuver were often kicking my ass (and brain) for around 30 minutes. Make the WorkerDroids that chase you hover right where you need them, use the environment to your benefit, and one tip that proved helpful was to remember to experiment with erasing color as much as you do painting it.
Soon enough, you’re asked to get in a little mischief. You’re going where you’re not supposed to go (so says your sadistic, snarky overseers) and taking peeks behind curtains to lift the façade of the tests. People are not who they initially seem and their motives are not pure of heart. Luckily, yours are, and all you want is to get back to your realm, even if it means threatening the known fabrics of the universes.
The sense of accomplishment you feel exacerbates as time goes on. Since I usually play more action- or adventure-oriented games with comparatively basic puzzles if any, ChromaGun 2 was a legitimate mental workout and break from what I’m used to. Even when you finally solve a puzzle and think “…really?” to yourself in incredulity at how simple the solution ended up being, you bring with you knowledge to take onto the next puzzles. The light bulbs we’re going off so much over my own head, I fear for my next electricity bill, but no matter, I’ll be invoicing Pixel Maniacs for the difference.
There is also a fair amount of platforming later on. It’s required so you have to get comfortable with jumping and manipulating platforms and the environment in general to get to where you need to be. It’s never too punishing and overall not bad thanks to rock solid controls and anyone with a familiarity with first-person games where you have to navigate complex areas will do just fine. You can’t even sprint or crouch so there’s a lot less factors at play than most other games with platforming can have.
I’m sure there’s a very good reason why this was hidden in the walls of the testing facility
It’s all quite relaxing too. In spite of the voices prodding and teasing you from time to time, there’s a serenity to it all. Just you, paint, and a lovely ambient soundtrack that sometimes veers into more energetic fare like the ultra popular Allegro movement from Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik serenade. (You know the one, good painting music.) Humming synthesizers warm and massage the mind during most puzzles with more action-oriented areas like ones where you’re being chased by single-minded WorkerDroids having bolder music with splashing drums and driving rhythms in addition to melodic synths to give the game a more cinematic feel.
For those that like a little deviation, there’s optional trinkets to collect in the form of golden ChromaGuns. They don’t affect gameplay in any way that I could tell, they seem like pure collectibles for the fun of it. Depending on the size of the puzzle area, there would be one to a few of them to find and you always know how many due to badges being visible when paused in-game and on the level selection menu. My motivation to find each one was low, but I did happen across 20 of the total 58 by the time I finished ChromaGun 2. One of the toughest puzzles I found in Chapter 2 was a maze-like formation where you had to shift three different droids onto switches to open a door that took me over 30 minutes. I thought it was required to progress. Nope, turns out what was behind the door was a golden ChromaGun. Thanks?
Maybe you’re wondering, “this all sounds great, but for a game so dependent on color, it seems limiting to those who can’t see color like most do,” and I’m here to say that the developer thought of that and then some. Pixel Maniacs went to great lengths to make their colorblind mode more than an afterthought or tacked-on feature to satisfy basic accessibility. The Settings menu even says, “We’re kinda proud of it tbh,” when you select their colorblind mode which includes distinct shapes on top of the primary and mixed colors in the world. I imagine learning how to mix shapes is a bit more complicated than colors, but the option is there. There’s also audio cues to play with and adaptable controls, though I did not experiment with those.
This is a good time to mention the default controls and look sensitivities felt great to me. Your fingers aren’t tripping over themselves to accomplish feats to finish puzzles, you’re never forced to set new actions-per-minute records to progress. In fact, when you start a new game, the first message you see before you’re brought into ChromaGun 2‘s world is a promise that you’ll never need to have quick reflexes to progress through the game. This is mostly true from my experience. Some puzzles do require specific timing to nail the solution in the intended way, or at least my way, but it’s nothing most people couldn’t accomplish with some practice. Since you can never die in ChromaGun 2 (the attack drones are all bark, no bite), the demand and anxiety are both low. Take your time, plot things out, remember the color wheel, be okay with being wrong, and you’ll be enjoying your time with this game.
You grow to love these little guys after a while
I do have critiques though. When I was around midway through the game, I found the characters starting to grate a bit. Both Richard and Mildred are good motivators as antagonists, their writing and performances are solid, but not as memorable as other contemporaries or their influences. It wasn’t until Chapter 4 when I started to come back around on them, and Chapter 5 gives plenty of opportunities for them to shine more as characters when universes twist and break under the weight of the game’s premise, and I unfortunately do mean that literally at certain points.
My biggest complaint with ChromaGun 2 is one that hopefully others don’t have to experience. While there are some little technical issues here and there that don’t particularly detract from the enjoyment (for instance, assets like paint waterfalls clip in and out sometimes, or a couple typos in the subtitles), I did encounter some softlocking that prevented me from progressing in Chapter 5. In the segment titled “Interdimensional Space Station,” I accidentally got a droid stuck between a horizontal moving platform and solid floor twice, unable to move either back into place forcing me to restart. In “Chromamaché Paperworks,” an otherwise very charming level where everything’s made of cardboard, I had to restart three times to get its moving parts working ideally. Elevator lifts became desynched which got me stuck in a cardboard prison, and a couple triggers at the very end of the level wouldn’t, well, trigger, forcing me to restart again two separate times.
Luckily, none of these issues were big time losses, but they’re all issues that should be patched out if possible to avoid frustration. Mid-level checkpointing could also be implemented to help ease problems like this if they can’t be reliably fixed, but I understand how that could prove difficult given some puzzle layouts.
Beating ChromaGun 2 was awesome, a great climax of a build-up that perhaps started a little too late. The experimental and frankly wacky aspects of the game are so charming and genuinely interesting enough to curve your lips into a smirk regularly, but mostly kept for the final chapter. While it’s quite substantial and long, the game could have avoided a soggier midsection with less in-fighting of the antagonists and initiating the explorative and fun aspects and settings of the game sooner. I appreciate slow burns and setting up your world and plot with some details and deliberation, but the pacing felt off to me as a result.
You’ll find some satirically dystopian corpospeak littered around the universes of ChromaGun 2
Still, it’s all nothing a little paint thinner couldn’t help fix! It’s hard not to recommend ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard, so of course I will. The puzzles are satisfying, I felt immense satisfaction working within (and out of) its boundaries, and now I feel like I could apply to be in Mensa. The places it goes, literally and figuratively, are things I haven’t seen done in a game like this before. I’d hate to spoil any of the key moments so I won’t, suffice to say they all work incredibly well, from the easter egg references to other games and media, to things from Pixel Maniacs’ own creative minds. It was truly an adventure, spanning worlds, colors, textures, matter, just about anything you could think of.
ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard gets a big recommendation for those who like to think their ways into trouble and have their persistence and own creativity rewarded with something unique that helps push the genre forward.
by David Rodriguez
