Quite a number of years ago when the original ChromaGun arrived on the scene, feeling perhaps a little too closely aligned with the Portal series, I walked away seeing the potential, but only feeling lukewarm about how it turned out. Now, many years later, the sequel is here on the Nintendo Switch 2, and while it still may not have clearly broken through into being a top-tier experience on the system, it’s most definitely a good time and demonstrates a major step up over the original.

For anyone unfamiliar, at its core this is a first-person shooter as a puzzle game, with you controlling the namesake ChromaGun, which will allow you to change the color of panels and other objects to a variety of effects over the course of the experience. For the most part, you are given a reasonably soft introduction to the game’s core concepts, restricted to only one color and keeping things simpler. Once you’re fully off and running you’ll be able to switch between 3 colors, leading to all sorts of combinations, and also pick up the crucial ability to revert things to their original color as well, something the game is happy to take advantage of in more complex challenges. The good news in all of this is that, for the most part, this really is all about the puzzles and not asking much of you in terms of dexterity for quick reflexes or making challenging jumps. You can take things at their own pace, and without much in the way of a threat of death it tries to keep this a low-stress affair, though you will need to take some leaps of faith at times conceptually.

Of course, there will be times where the game will sorely test your patience as well, which I suppose is inevitable given the complexity of some of the scenarios you’ll encounter. The thing is, a fair number of times where I felt stuck the problem wasn’t so much that I didn’t understand what I wanted or needed to do, it was that I didn’t see some panel in the distance or irregular object in the room I hadn’t ever painted before, so I’d unfortunately ignored it at first. Especially as you begin visiting other dimensions, and the aesthetics of the environments change, there can be a little bit of a learning curve to what you can and can’t paint, and I can’t say that it’s always intuitive aside from always looking carefully for anything around you that’s plain white. Given the somewhat sterile and clinical look many of the environments can have at times, some confusion in that area can be understood. Even with some of those quibbles though, this is still an engaging, and often funny, first-person puzzler that provides its own refreshing challenge and stands out as being pretty unique in the Switch 2 eShop.