Hide in plain sight.
You're a small blob of wet paint with two enormous googly eyes. You can't fight the guards, and running away only means hiding somewhere else. What you can do is paint yourself the exact color of the floor, and let them walk right over the top of you.
The whole game
Hold the eyedropper over the ground and it magnifies like a jeweller's loupe, until you can pick out the one shade you want. Then paint it onto yourself, a stroke at a time, until there's nothing left sticking out. Grass tufts, road grit, cobble grout, the pool of light under a lamp, the brushwork on a gallery canvas - all of it is honest color, and all of it is yours to take.
Get it right and it is genuinely startling. A guard looks straight at you, catches on nothing, and carries on down the lane - and if its beat runs over the top of you it walks over the top of you, drawn across your back while your blob clamps its breath, locks both eyes on it and sweats one bead. Get it wrong by one shade too light and it stops, turns round, and starts walking toward the smudge on its floor.
How it plays
Recordings of somebody actually playing, a few seconds each. Most of these are the plan working. One of them is a plan going wrong in the most expensive room in the game.
Painted for the gallery's floor canvas, you are a masterpiece of nothing at all. Two feet later on bare marble you are a stolen Van Gogh walking itself out of the building. Camouflage is a decision about where you're standing, which is why re-coating on the move is the skill worth having.
You do not slide about. The blob hauls itself along like the animal it is, reaching with its nose and dragging its tail up after it - and for about two seconds after you lay it, the paint on you is still wet enough to come off on the floor. So a fresh coat trails a stripe of itself behind you, fat where you planted and thin where you reached, drying into the boards as it dries on you. Then it runs out and stops, which is the paint telling you it has gone off.
There's an island, and you arrive by boat. You walk it - a beach, a coppice, a wood, a mansion and its grounds - and the old owner's pictures are still hanging where he left them, in a chapel, a burner's hut, a bay off the great hall, each behind a red curtain until you've earned it. Find one you like the look of, walk up to it, and step in: you are standing in the place it's a picture of. It's broad daylight out there, and the only dark on the island is the parts you haven't opened yet. Doors priced in stars open most of it, and a few places have no path to them at all.
Walk to the edge of it and there's a beach, a few steps of sea you can wade into, and then water that will not have you. Whatever goes under the surface loses its paint at once, along the exact line the water touches - the half of you still on dry sand comes out untouched - and then the undertow shoves you back at the beach to paint the rest of yourself on again. The same water runs through the levels: a creek you can ford and come out the far side of soaking, a koi pond too deep in the middle to cross at all. Nothing tells you which one you're looking at - it's how wide the water is.
In Hide and Seek one of you gets a paint gun and no paint at all, and has to sweep a fogged arena while everybody else holds very still and tries not to laugh. Infection turns everyone you catch into another hunter, so the room fills up around the last player still hidden. Head to Head splits you into two teams and tells neither one where the other is. Five modes in all, and two of them do not hand you a blob.
In Hide and Seek (Prop Hunt) and Infection (Prop Hunt) you are a crate, a barrel, a market stall, a suit of armor - a real piece of that map's furniture, at the size that map draws it, blank white and yours to paint. Stand where that sort of thing stands, hold still, and the hunter's job becomes telling what moved from what was always there. Your paint comes with you when you swap. A big prop is a better hiding place and a worse body, because it will not fit back out through the door you came in by. And painting yourself the color of the floor is the one thing you may not do.
The cast
They don't all look for the same thing. A coat that fools one of them will hand you straight to the next.
The blob
A palmful of wet paint with eyes. Slow, squishy, and completely defenseless - but you can be any color you can find.
Sees color
Walks its patrol and looks. Match the ground under you and its gaze slides right off you. Get the shade wrong and you can watch it work out that floors don't usually have eyes.
Smells paint
A hound that does not care how well you're painted — it cares that you're painted recently. A wet coat drags a smear, wet feet leave prints, and it runs whichever you left last.
Reads shape
Color-blind, so there's nothing to lie to it with. It reads your outline instead. The only way past is to squash yourself flat against something and stop being blob-shaped.
Hears you move
No eyes. No face. It hears you cross gravel, so paint is no help here at all. You go slowly, you go somewhere quieter, and you creep out of the spot it heard - it gropes its way over, and it can still catch what it just heard.
Stares you out
One of your friends, handed a paint gun and no paint of their own. The same little body as everyone else, wearing whatever eyes they picked, which is exactly what makes them so hard to spot coming. And they can stop dead, narrow their eyes onto one patch of floor and hold it. It pins them where they stand and costs them the rest of the room, and it is the one thing out here a perfect coat does not survive. In Infection there are more of them every minute.
And the rest
Fog of war. On night levels you learn the map by walking it, and lose track of the guards entirely. Lamps, crystals and glowing mushrooms pool enough light to go on.
Things that ruin an afternoon. Searchlights, security cameras, rotating sprinklers, and rain that washes a coat you spent a minute on straight off you.
Improvised tools. Throw a rock to pull a guard somewhere else, or knock it out cold. Lob a paint bomb, or run the hose along the floor, and make a hiding place that wasn't there a second ago - then point either one at a guard instead, because cover one in wet paint and it shuts its eye and stands there until it has got the stuff off.
Thirty-two levels, and an island to hang them on. One level teaches an idea, the next is where you use it, sunlit gardens through to a crystal-cavern finale, each with a secret spot hidden in it and three stars to chase. The stars you bank open the doors deeper into the island, and you can pull out a chart of the whole place to find your way back to any of it.
Build & share. A full in-game level editor with a tile-design studio, and Steam Workshop publishing.
Play your way. Keyboard-and-mouse or gamepad everywhere, remappable, with a scheme that adapts on the fly. And since this is a game about telling colors apart: the arcs that warn you change shape as well as color, so you can read them without seeing the difference, and you can turn on a tone that rises as your coat closes on the ground.
Blotch is in development for Windows, Linux and macOS. The Steam page is up, and for a game this small a wishlist genuinely is the most useful thing you can do for it.
