Chroma Zero
ekorz · 2024 · Puzzle, Adventure, First-Person, Logic, Colorful
PC
Very Positive96% · 306
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About Chroma Zero
✦ AI summary
Explore a mysterious, color-filled world where the environment itself is the puzzle and everything reacts dynamically to your actions as you uncover its secrets through experimentation and curiosity. This solo-developer metroidvania challenges your intuition with knowledge-based progression and no traditional levels, drawing inspiration from games like Outer Wilds and Antichamber to deliver a discovery-focused adventure you'll want to experience fresh.
Explore a unique and connected world. Understand its fragile balance, uncover its deepest questions, and find more than just the answers. Chroma Zero immerses you in a universe of mystery, color, energy, and movement, and challenges your expectations and intuition. There are no levels, the puzzles are integrated into the fabric of the space itself, and everything can change in the blink of an eye. Exploration and curiosity are rewarded.
Key Features
- Knowledge Based Progression – Learn the rules of the space, and you can progress farther in the world and deeper into the mystery
- Open-world Puzzles – Explore everywhere, the world itself is the puzzle. There are no levels.
- Extremely Dynamic Environment – The world reacts to your actions in dramatic fashion
- An enchanting and beautiful Original Score by Adam Kromelow and Dan Rufolo
- Narrative with charm and wit, and at times, wit and charm
Gameplay
Players generally take between 6 and 12 hours to finish the game, and a bit more to explore everything. Most progress is gated only by knowledge, which is gained by exploring and experimenting. This is an immersive, non-linear, risk-taking and moderately challenging "Metroidbrainia" game, made by a solo developer (hi there). The narrative is mostly light-hearted, but can be impactful at times. The puzzles ramp up in difficulty, though the game helps to guide you as well. So if you're exploring everywhere, you will know what to do -- maybe just not how to do it! I was inspired by games like Antichamber, Outer Wilds, Myst/Riven, and the discovery elements of Tunic. I hope to bring more games like these into the world, since by their nature they are focused on giving you a wonderful and surprising first-playthrough.Extras
- Controller Support – This game works 100% with controllers except for adjusting items in the 'Settings' subsection of the main/pause menu system. So, if you want to do stuff like change your resolution, adjust the sensitivity, adjust the key-bindings, turn on/off motion blur, etc. etc. it is ALL THERE for your fiddling pleasure, but you need a mouse to do it. Please forgive me this one trespass, dear gamer.
- Color Vision Deficiency Mode – An overlay can be positioned in any corner of the screen, or in the center, which describes the point-of-interest you're currently looking at.
- Photosensitivity Modes – A Brightness Offset adds range to the in-game brightness slider, and adds low-contrast animations to soften otherwise high-contrast events. An intro-animation offset adjusts the way the game starts, which typically involves a symmetrical pattern repeating across the screen. The offset makes it asymmetric.
- Speedrun Timer – A reposition-able timer starts on Play, and stops during dialogue sequences, but otherwise continues until game-over. Also, if this timer is enabled, the button-hold to delete your save file is sped up so fresh restarts can happen more quickly. Visit our discord for more speedrunning discussion and leaderboard links.
- Secrets – (..uh, spoiler!..)
- You can pet the cat(s)
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
Stunning game with intricate puzzling that brings some rewarding learning but also very well paced discoveries. Only funnily discovered the term "MetroidBrainia" which is the style of game I found from Outer Wilds, Tunic, Animal Well etc. and this fits in right among them. Definitely worth a pickup!3 found this helpful
Great puzzles, sense of discovery, and sound track.1 found this helpful
To the prospective player, I'd like to note that there are probably 5-10 puzzles in the game, total, and that a lot of your time will be spent tinkering around with the game's systems and doing things that you're told to do by a rather toneless NPC (who gives '"cool" high school science teacher'). Overall, I have mixed thoughts on this. I've designed and created a few puzzle games before and I noticed this one having a lot of the same problems that I was having, chiefly with getting the player to the actual puzzles and clearly distinguishing what is/isn't part of a puzzle. I'm kinda annoyed that (spoilers) a lot of the puzzles you can access first have basically nothing to do with the mechanics that initially available to you. I wish there were more self-contained puzzles that allowed the player to gain further familiarity with the mechanics, and that the temples actually gave you something to solve instead of just obtusely hinting at systems in the game. The mechanics are really interesting but I felt like there wasn't ever a puzzle that truly used these systems to the fullest. I also felt like the logic was a bit iffy at times, especially after the SPOILEREVENT when the po…
very good.
Wonderful little puzzle game, using geometry and color to explore and solve a lovely cubic world. It takes a little bit to figure out what's going on in the beginning, but the payoff is worth it so keep at it. If you get stuck, take a break and come back later, helped me solve many of the puzzles.
good thinky, the middle part gets a lil tough to think about but it also lets you do quite a lot if you know what you're doing within the bounds of the game that is
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