A camouflage stealth adventure where you are a blob of wet paint, and the best hiding place is a color you copied from the world.

What if, instead of hiding behind a wall, you could simply become the wall? That’s the idea behind Blotch, a stealth adventure where you paint yourself to match the world around you. Guards patrol the maps, and the closer your color matches the surface you’re standing on, the harder you are to spot. Sometimes the best strategy is surprisingly simple: stop moving, hold your nerve and let a guard walk right over you.

I played the free demo, and while there’s still room for more environmental interaction, the central idea stood out right away. Blotch turns color into its main stealth mechanic, which feels different from the usual hide-in-the-shadows approach.

Official gameplay trailer.

Hide in Plain Sight

Using the cursor, you pick a color from the environment with an eyedropper and apply it to your blob. You can copy the floor, grass, a wall or even part of a painting. These are your tools:

• Eyedropper: Pick colors from anywhere in the scenery.
• Brush: Adjust its size and switch between square and round tips.
• Exposure bar: Shows how well your current color matches the surface beneath you.

The paint is also part of the puzzles. In one example from the demo, a storm destroys a bridge and leaves only its drawing behind, so you color the drawing with the indicated colors to restore it and cross.

🖱️ You paint with the cursor, so precision matters. A comfortable gaming mouse helps you match colors and brush strokes more easily.

Wet Paint Can Give You Away

A perfect disguise isn’t always enough, according to the official site:

• Wet paint leaves a trail. It rubs off on the ground while it’s wet, so you can leave a path straight to your hiding spot.
• A new floor needs a new disguise. A coat that matches a painting stands out on bare marble, so you have to repaint when you move somewhere new.
• Water washes paint off. Wading through a creek removes your coat, and you have to paint yourself again on the other side.

The Demo: An Island of Paintings

The demo is largely an introduction, and you can choose between a tutorial level and the start of the campaign. Your character and friends arrive by boat on an island on a stormy night. There you meet the residents and gain access to new paintings, which work as the game’s levels. The island is a hub: you can talk to its inhabitants and use the map to select paintings directly, which saves you from walking back and forth.

According to the official site, the full game has 32 levels, with paintings that take you from gardens to a grand old house, plus secrets, stars to earn and gates to open.

Who Is Looking for You

Each enemy looks for something different, so a color that fools one may do nothing against another:

• Guards look for your color. Match the ground and hold still.
• Trackers follow wet paint trails and footprints.
• Profilers look for your outline, so you may need to flatten yourself against a wall or a prop.
• Listeners can’t see you, but they hear you moving.

You also get ways to fight back: throw a rock to stun an enemy, lob a paint bomb or spray a hiding spot with your hose.

Multiplayer: Hide From Your Friends

The game supports online multiplayer, and the lobby limit is up to eight players. In Hide and Seek, one player becomes the Seeker, a blob with a paint cannon, while the others hide. The other modes include:

• Infection, where everyone caught joins the hunt
• Head to Head, a team contest
• Heist, where you sneak painted crates past other players
• Prop Hunt versions of Hide and Seek and Infection, where you turn into a crate, barrel or suit of armor and try not to move when the hunter looks your way

Voice chat is proximity-based during a match, and I didn’t test the multiplayer in the demo, so I can’t say how well these modes work in practice.

🎧 Proximity voice chat makes hide-and-seek better. A headset with a good microphone helps you coordinate, or tease your friends.

My Impressions

The maps work like small sandboxes, with a nice parallax effect and plenty of details in the scenery. They are welcoming, but there isn’t much to interact with outside the objectives, and that’s the main area where I felt the game could offer more. The levels look like places I’d want to poke around in, yet most of the objects are there as scenery or as camouflage opportunities.

Everything is well signposted, and the colors are carefully designed, which matters when color recognition is part of the gameplay. The music is soft and doesn’t get in the way. The accessibility options are a thoughtful addition: alert arcs differ in shape as well as color, there are high-contrast alerts, and an optional tone reads your camouflage level as a pitch, so you don’t have to rely only on telling colors apart. Controls are fully remappable, with keyboard and mouse or controller.

Requirements and Extras

According to the official support page, the minimum requirements are:

• Windows: Windows 10 64-bit, dual-core 2.0 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, a Direct3D 12 or Vulkan 1.0 GPU and 300 MB of storage
• macOS: macOS 11 Big Sur, Apple Silicon or a 2014-or-newer Intel Mac, 2 GB of RAM and 300 MB of storage
• Linux/SteamOS: a modern 64-bit distro or SteamOS 3, dual-core 2.0 GHz, 2 GB of RAM and a Vulkan 1.0 GPU

The Steam page lists the recommended specs: a quad-core 2.5 GHz processor, 4 GB of RAM, a dedicated or modern integrated GPU and 500 MB of storage. The full game also includes a level editor and tile studio, so players can build maps and share them on the Steam Workshop.

Is Blotch Worth Watching?

After the demo, I think the camouflage mechanic is the most interesting thing about Blotch. The idea is easy to understand, but it creates more possibilities than it first appears: you pay attention to your surroundings, think about where you’re going next and sometimes decide whether to keep moving or simply stop and disappear into the scenery. The demo’s environments could be more interactive, but the foundation is promising, and the full game has a lot going on, from different enemy types to multiplayer, Prop Hunt and a level editor.

If the idea of hiding in plain sight, or of fooling your friends as a suspicious-looking piece of furniture, sounds fun, the free demo is a good way to see if it clicks.

Wishlist on Steam: Blotch | Official site: blotchgame.com

Disclosure: I played the free demo only.

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