UFO 50 Retrospective Part 16 - Camouflage
Don't play this if you don't like watching lizards being killed over and over
This was the second game I finished, which look longer and more brain power than Magic Garden. I 100%’d it in a single sitting, which is a good sign.
Camouflage is a unique puzzle game, where you play as a lizard. The gods of this world, the sun and the raincloud, believe you have it too easy, and cannot evolve this way, and so they introduce hazards to your environment. But to make things fair, they give you a gift: The ability to change your color, so you can blend into the world around you!
Each level of Camouflage drops you into a world of differnet colored backgrounds. You can press B to shift to the color of that background, which allows you to avoid the sight of any enemies while on that background. You can press A to see where enemies can see, which is massively helpful. Your goal is to escape to the exit, maybe while also grabbing all the extra collectables along the way. There’s two oranges and a baby on every level, and the baby basically makes you 2x as long, which makes puzzle solving to escape all the more complicated.
The game is a lot of pattern recognition, and when the alligators come into play, some light action, because while the frogs are basically sentries you must avoid, the gators are always on the move, as sentries, so some puzzles involve using them as cover from frogs and whatnot. The game is extremely interesting and fun the entire way through, nothing challenging, but a nice brain tickler, lots of “Aha, THERE’S the way through” moments.
It’s also got a cute backstory to it. Gerry Smolski’s mother made a children’s book that went unpublished, we all know what that’s like tbh, so they made it into a game. This game does have very “children’s fable” energy to it, ESPECIALLY with the ending, which I will not spoil. It’s a really good one, highly recommended.
9.5/10