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Who did it? Who was responsible for making Kid Chameleon part of the Sega Genesis canon? I never owned it. I don’t recall seeing it for rent. I didn’t know anyone who had it. Yet, this game sticks around on every Genesis anthology like it’s a fuckin’ virus.

That’s how I first encountered it, anyway. I had Sega Smash Pack II for the PC. I think I bought that from a Schoolastic book order catalog? It was a good choice—I played the absolute shit out of it, keyboard controls be damned. Shining Force was a formative game for me and formed the bulk of my memories with that collection, but the others provided their own nostalgic fragments. I associate Flicky with being the game I would wind down with after I had exhausted myself in Shining Force, whether I had just lost a map or otherwise. When I had more energy than that game could handle, I would opt for Kid Chameleon—and undoubtedly leave more frustrated than when I started.

Coincidentally, I watched a friend play through Shining Force 1 and 2 for his first time, and after finishing 2, he expressed interest in finishing some other Genesis “classics.” Kid Chameleon was brought up, and I advocated it as a game I had always wanted to knock off my bucket list. Neither of us having learned our lesson from our previous experiences with KC, we dove in and traded off the controls until we reached the end of the game, with liberal use of save states.

It’s over. Put the chameleon in the bag. Yeah, we cheated. Yeah, I didn’t beat every level myself, but I think I’ve about reached my tolerance limit for Kid Chameleon. Any possible interest I had in completing this game legitimately evaporated after seeing what that would entail; our final playtime for this platformer clocked in at around four hours. I can’t do anymore, man. I’m tired. I’m scared. I’m frightened. I’m confused.

In Kid Chameleon, you play as a totes radical ’90s kid tasked with saving children captured by a sentient computer program in control of the latest arcade craze: a holographic, virtual reality tour-de-farce. The only particularly amusing thing about this setup is that your player character looks like a Top Gun-era Tom Cruise. Even his size is accurate! This legendary Kid’s skills were so legendary that he became a legend; they called this legend, Kid Chameleon.

It’s a bit weird to me that someone would make their game’s premise about playing a game. Since the entirety of Kid Chameleon takes place in the in-universe arcade game, Wild Side, you’re entirely playing that. I can only guess that the virtual reality setting gave the developers an excuse to do whatever the fuck they wanted. If the game took place in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy world, the stages set in a metropolitan US city would feel a bit out of place. Better yet, you can design completely arbitrary, clusterfuck levels and claim that it’s deliberately lampshading the artificial nature of the fictional game you’re playing! It’s genius. I’m not saying anyone actually made that claim, but that’s sure as hell what I would have gone for.

Me, personally? I want some kind of excuse. I feel vaguely wronged. It’s an irrational feeling, I know. But I am curious why Kid Chameleon‘s designers made the choices they did, specifically the choices that led to the game sucking. Yeah, I can’t misrepresent myself, here. I think Kid Chameleon is a bit lousy, with “a bit” doing the heavy-lifting. It’s by no means terrible, and the quality is probably even above par if one were to grab a completely random platformer to compare it to.

…

Hm.

In lieu of alternatives, I asked a chatbot to name a random Genesis platformer and received Ristar as a response. Really? One of the most well-known B-tier Genesis games? I mean, that could be an entirely random pick, but what are the odds, right?

“Do it again.”

“Have you played Rocket Knight Adventures?”

Why, yes, I have, actually.

Again, then.

Fuck you.

Let’s just say I’m right. Isn’t that the point of this tech, anyway?

Kid Chameleon sucks, but it has a DIY, janky charm to it that only an early Genesis game could. You either know it, or you don’t. It’s a vibe. Only ’90s kids will remember this. Only ’90s kids will remember thinking a game was better than it was because sometimes you didn’t feel like spin-dashing. ONLY ’90s kids.

If your path has somehow not crossed KC, the moment-to-moment gameplay is your typical platformer of the time, complete with Mario-esque power blocks that reward the player powerups and such. Its standout characteristic is the player’s ability to don several different masks, which have the potential to change your physics and give you new abilities. They also act as a second life bar, and once it’s out, you revert to your shitty kid self. Lose all your health there, and you’re down a life. You get the gist.

As far as gimmicks go, it’s a pretty cool one, and I have to imagine it’s responsible for the vast majority of positive memories with Kid Chameleon. There’s a certain magic in replaying the first few levels of KC, which would be the only levels you reached before a game over, and discovering new masks and secret paths. Inevitably, your game would always end before you ever saw the limits of the game elements. For me, it created a sort of mystique to KC. Because most of my play sessions were defined by surprises, I made the assumption that KC kept that energy up. Now I can confirm that KC runs out of steam probably less than 20% of the way through its adventure.

This is the kind of game where you do not want to peek behind the curtain, because you’ll just see a bunch of boozed-up stagehands desperately trying to scramble the next set together. One of them is half in costume. He’s balding, and his five-o-clock shadow is somehow barely visible despite the ambient backlights. He turns to you, bloodshot eyes nearly devoid of expression, and yet you can see a glimmer of life that recognizes you should probably not be looking back there. Without changing his tempo or uttering a word, he slowly raises his hand at you to make a shooing motion, only to hopelessly slouch back down and continue with whatever menial task he was doing. You leave—not because you were told, but because there just wasn’t anything interesting. Somehow, the world is a little less magical now. That analogy is perfect. Trust me. That’s Kid Chameleon. It’s a drunk clown or something. I don’t know.

I’m really trying to avoid actually talking about this game, because I feel like it would just devolve into various descriptors of how chaotic and illogical its level design is, and it would feel like a low-rent Angry Video Game Nerd episode. And if anyone wanted that, they could just watch the Angry Video Game Nerd.

Okay, so like, there’s these masks, right. And they all do these different things. But some of them do things that piss you off, but sometimes you’ll need them anyway. Like there’s this mask that turns you into a knight. It makes you really heavy and shit cuz of the armor, so you can break blocks by falling on them. Except sometimes, those blocks are forming a bridge and you break through it by doing your most fundamental action, jumping, and you fall to your death. But the knight can also climb walls. Not all walls; just some walls. Some knight-approved walls. The knight mask lets you perform the iconic knight maneuver where you shuffle your hands up a wall to scale it as if you were Spider-Man. So, you can’t get rid of the knight mask, cuz there might be a wall you need to climb later, you know? Or maybe there’s not. Or maybe there is, but there’s another exit. Or maybe there’s another knight mask right by the scalable wall. I don’t know. Fuck it.

The samurai mask allows you to jump high and swing a sword. Both sound nice, but jumping is already difficult to control, and staying in the air for any longer than you need to is fucking frightening, and your sword has the smallest hitbox this side of Mega Man Xtreme 2‘s Z-Saber. There’s a rhino mask or something. It allows you to go into a ramming stance while running, and you break blocks that you ram your little baby brain into. Not all blocks, though; just special rhino-brand blocks. I hate the rhino mask. Its ability is incredibly situation, and it seems to have no secondary utility. It didn’t seem to me like you had an active hitbox when you used it, so you couldn’t utilize the charge as an easy way to deal with enemies while moving—way easier than jumping would have been, anyway.

Uh… there’s a Jason Vorhees mask. Literally, it’s just Jason Vorhees. You throw axes as a projectile weapon. It’s actually not bad, because jumping on enemies is so treacherous, but as the game goes on, it eventually takes like, 20 axes to kill a single enemy. There’s a mask that gives you a visor that can expose hidden blocks. This is great when there’s hidden blocks. There are often no hidden blocks. How can you tell? You don’t. They’re hidden. Fuck that mask. There’s some kind of bird/superhero mask that actually makes you look pretty damn cool, and it appropriately has the best ability in the game, as it just allows you to cheat. Mashing the C button in mid-air allows you to perpetually fly by spinning. Getting this mask is always an amazing feeling. Losing it is the opposite.

The mask that allows you to fly is not to be confused with the mask that turns you into a fly, which is, in fact, not able to fly. Instead, the fly mask allows you to kick off walls to gain further height. It’s just a more tactile, dynamic way of achieving what the knight does, so I don’t think that mask really warranted its existence. Anyway, your sprite also becomes smaller, with all that would obviously entail. This is technically one of the more useful masks, but something about it pisses me off. I feel like the controls become even more slippery with it on, but I could be imagining it.

The final two masks are in the “oh god, please get this off me” category. A skull soldier helmet turns you into a vaguely Nazi-esque tank with the former sticking out of its hatch. This makes your sprite significantly wider, to the point where navigating through certain parts of levels is straight up impossible. In exchange, you get to fire bouncing skulls out of your cannon. It’s great DPS, but unfortunately, KC is a platformer. The ultimate mask has you reach peak ’90s power, by which I mean you acquire a hoverboard that’s constantly moving forward. This is great, because the game already feels like it has no traction. Anyway, its secondary gimmick is genuinely quite fun. It allows the player to invert their gravity and skate along the ceiling, ala Metal Warriors. The transition is fluid and fairly unrestrictive, allowing for great maneuverability should the player become accustomed to its physics. At times, you can essentially rapid-swap between the floor and ceiling, deftly avoiding obstacles by utilizing the slight mid-air lag before you’re pulled upwards or downwards. This could have carried the entire game on its own, as certain levels specifically designed for it demonstrate.

What really kills this game are the fucking controls. It’s like the whole world is made of linoleum, and you’re asked to navigate it while wearing plastic bags over your feet. From beginning to end, my friend and I struggled to find any level of consistency with the physics. I’m sure it can be done, but I would not call it intuitive in the way Mario or Sonic are. In those games, I can naturally gauge how much distance I’ll get from a jump relative to my speed, and how momentum will carry me as I interact with obstacles. In Kid Chameleon, it felt like I was always guessing. It’s like a fucking sobriety test, and we were always attempting to recenter every jump we made. When the game finds the gall to attempt ice physics, it’s a devil’s bargain that it barely feels any more difficult than the normal physics. Tom Cruise cannot handle his liquor, let me tell you. Small constitution, I guess.

What I find more interesting than KC’s masks or its anarchic excuse for platforming is its overall structure. Speaking broadly: it has none. More specifically, it makes no sense. The game begins in straightforward fashion, as one moves from left to right until the end-of-level flag is reached, but quickly devolves into insanity. Teleporter pads become part-and-parcel to the KC experience and will transfer you anywhere from the start of the level to something entirely unfamiliar, and it’s usually the latter. At first, this is pretty exciting. Finding a hidden warp to an unseen level background depicting a more fantastical setting than anything yet encountered creates hype for even crazier locales. There’s a warp early on that has you traverse a screen with a backdrop placing you high above the clouds, with distant castles on floating islands. Can you reach those far-off dwellings? For a while, it seems like you may actually be taken there—or anywhere, really. It’s enough to keep you playing and guessing.

What makes this pattern initially hold together is the game’s success at grounding your relative location and progress. Early on, these teleporters weave you in-and-out of what are the standard introductory levels, essentially serving as side pathways through each “world.” Basically, you might be traveling through Lava World, find a warp to Sky World, then return to Lava World from a back entrance. Your brief stint in Sky World leaves an impression because it contrasts with the Lava World that is your standard backdrop at that point of the game. There’s context for it being out-of-place. There’s something ordinary that’s relative to it and makes it extraordinary.

At some point—I want to say shortly after the City World—this logic begins to completely break down. The chaos that once flavored Kid Chameleon comes to define it. The boundaries of what can be considered a “level” cease to exist as you begin to go from warp to warp, biome to biome, world to world in the span of minutes—warps upon warps across endless forks in the road. You lose any anchor of where you are in the game. The sub-levels aren’t obvious sideroads off the main path, because there is no main path—no place to call home. Nowhere to serve as a point of contrast. How far have you come? Are you going backwards? You used to see new environments that made you think you were making progress, but now you’re seeing assets in-line with the “first” world. Were you supposed to take a different teleporter? How can you tell? Are you being punished with the latest level design, or is this just the normal difficulty curve?

What the fuck is going on? What’s being communicated in this level design? Why was this block put there? Why does this enemy have a death animation, while another just vanishes from existence? Why does this enemy continue walking around endlessly with its head off once defeated? Were these originally meant for different games? Is it deliberate, because of the virtual world conceit? Is it supposed to feel like Action 52 on purpose? Why would something want to feel like Action 52 does? Would the intentionality of its arbitrariness make any of it better? I don’t want to go to the floating castle in the background anymore. It doesn’t feel special now. I don’t know where I am. I just want to go home.

And there it is: “Plethora.” I knew that stage name. I had, at some point as a child while playing Sega Smash Pack II, done some cheat I found on GameFAQs to skip to the final level. I never beat the final boss this way, but its grotesque sprite stuck in my mind. Did I mention before that this game has bosses? They just kind of appear whenever, and they’re always the same sprites of giant, floating heads. One of these encounters is in a level called “The Bagel Brothers.” There are no bagels to speak of, and I’m not convinced of their genetic relation.

Anyway, my turn to play lined up on the final boss. Destiny had navigated the multiverse of Kid Chameleon to arrive at my doorstep. I had to finish what I started. It took like, four tries? You jump on its head a lot. Its a boss. It’s a human centipede of heads, kind of like that Junji Ito manga. You know the one. Maybe you don’t. Whatever. I beat the game. Mark Cerny was in the credits for something. Oh, the music is kind of funky, but it gets pretty annoying. It feels like there’s five songs in the game.

This review had little to no structure. At first, I just wanted to hammer something out as a record of my torment. Then, I just kept going. I guess I can’t excise that part of me. Past a certain scope, I considered reorganizing this review into something closer in quality to my main-feature reviews. Then I thought, “fuck it.” I’m not gonna edit it. I’m not gonna fix bad sentence structure, syntax, or grammar. This review is perfect for Kid Chameleon. It’s just a bunch of stupid crap, and it sucks, but maybe you laugh a bit and ultimately feel glad that it exists. Because I’m glad Kid Chameleon exists, weird, annoying, and stupid as it is. It’s ambitious and memorable. Kid Chameleon is Super Mario Bros. by way of Salvador Dalí. Maybe that makes it more interesting. I don’t know. But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it did not need to control this goddamn poorly. I also know that I need to stop, because I feel like my blood sugar levels are off now. Bye!