ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard is the latest of the ChromaGun color puzzle games from PM Studios. After the initial title’s success, the ChromaGun is back once again to test players with their memory of basic color matching.
I got a chance to sit down and play 30 minutes of ChromaGun at Summer Game Fest. The demo opened with the standard fair for anyone familiar with these kinds of portal-like titles. In a testing facility you’ll be enticed to pick up the ChromaGun, getting just a single color at first your aim.
Your aim is to progress through a series of puzzle rooms that get more and more challenging as you go. The main way you progress is by successfully moving floating spheres around rooms. The way that you move them is by creating wall and ceiling panels of the same color.
A yellow sphere will be attracted to a yellow wall tile. This works when the switch you need the sphere to be on is located right under a tile. If the switch is between wall tiles then you may need to daisy chain it between two, in that case the sphere will move to an equidistant location between the two tiles.
How Do You Make Purple Again?
Adding further complication, different wall tiles and spheres will not just come in the primary colors – yellow, blue, and red – but also in Secondary colors. Forcing you to have to remember something basic like if you want your Blue Sphere to head towards the Purple wall tile then you’ll have to shoot your Sphere with the color Red.
The first few puzzle rooms were as I expected, the growing mechanics of colors and tiles creeping. While there was no strict tutorial, ChromaGun 2 did a good job to slowly layer mechanics.
A core theme within ChromaGun 2, something I learned as I leapt from a ledge straight into a portal was that ChromaGun’s ‘worlds’ are all based on alternate realities where you might trade out the sterile white walls and right angles, for curved structures, a visual filter that makes it look like you’re playing the game as a classic comic book, and the last ‘world’ I entered before I finished my time was a barnyard settings.
Weird Worlds
Each zone has a unique style that makes it easy to check where you are at any point, but didn’t vary too much in terms of gameplay. Regardless, it was an interesting reskin of what you’d expect to see in a game about completing tests.
Each zone additionally has a different robotic/AI voice as your tested who is confused upon your arrival, but interacts with you with a different personality.
It almost felt like the sensibilities and gameplay loop of a title like Portal got crossed somehow with the zaniness and unexpected theming of Psychonauts.
If you’re a fan of the original ChromaGun title, or you’re into the idea of a puzzle game that leans heavily into color shifting and matching then this will likely be a title that you’ll want to keep an eye on. There’s a lot of times where you see a game attempt to totally reinvent itself between iterations, but if you’re good at what you do is that totally necessary?
ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard was previewed at Summer Game Fest 2025.
