It started with a strange sense of déjà vu. Michael Kamm, the solo developer behind the elegant puzzle game Ouros, kept seeing something familiar in Zenless Zone Zero, the flashy action RPG from miHoYo. Not a passing resemblance, but a near-perfect recreation of his core mechanic, down to the tiniest design details. In late May 2026, he finally laid out the evidence in a detailed video, and what it revealed sent ripples through the indie dev community.
According to Kamm, the puzzle mode in question appeared in Zenless Zone Zero back in 2025. At the time, hardly anyone noticed because Ouros is a small, niche title without a marketing budget. But by 2026, something changed. People began accusing him of copying the big-name gacha game. “Because MiHoYo is an established billion-dollar company, and Ouros isn’t well known, I can see why people would assume that I copied them,” he explained in his video. The frustration in his voice is palpable: “But still, it’s frustrating to have your work cloned and then credited to somebody else.”
The similarities go far beyond mere genre convention. Both games feature a deceptively simple task—manipulating curves to guide a ball along a path. 👀 Yet Kamm’s side-by-side comparison highlights granular echoes that are hard to dismiss as coincidence. In both versions, players encounter “curve portals” that teleport the ball between different sections of the track. The hint system works almost identically, even down to the visual presentation. There’s a reverse-direction control placed in the same spot, and the hazy, flowing background art gives off the same dreamlike atmosphere. When design choices stack up that precisely, the word “inspiration” starts feeling inadequate.
Almost immediately after Kamm posted his comparison, some social media users suggested Ouros might actually be a copy of Primo, a free online game from 2023. But Kamm was ready for this. He traced the lineage back further, pointing out that Primo itself bears an uncanny resemblance to Splines ’n Shapes, a game he created for the Ludum Dare jam in 2020. 🌀 So the chain of inspiration—or copying—circles right back to him.
This kind of tangled lineage is more common than players might think. The games industry runs on iteration, and broad ideas move freely between studios. After Vampire Survivors exploded, bullet heaven games flooded the market. When Balatro became a hit, poker roguelikes sprouted overnight. The line between homage and cloning is blurry, and copyright law offers little protection for game mechanics. Only giant publishers can afford to fight those battles in court.
In this situation, two factors make the case especially galling for Kamm. First, the level of detail is unusually specific—this isn’t a vague genre overlap but a moment-to-moment replication of feel and function. Second, miHoYo has faced similar accusations before. Back in April 2026, the tiny studio Pipapo Games publicly accused the Genshin Impact developer of copying its upcoming cartography game Map Map. Pipapo’s demo had been on Steam for about a year, and they watched in disbelief as one of the biggest games on the planet integrated a suspiciously similar mapping mechanic just before their release date.
Map Map finally launched on May 28, 2026, carrying the emotional weight of that controversy. For a small team, seeing a towering corporation borrow your signature idea can feel like having your entire launch window stolen. The developers wrote at the time, “It’s a strange feeling to see one of the biggest games on the market straight up copying it. And all of that just shortly before we want to release.”
Yet Kamm, unlike some, isn’t threatening legal action or demanding compensation. His goal is simpler and perhaps more poignant: he just wants the record set straight. In an industry where attention flows toward the loudest voices and biggest marketing budgets, mistaken assumptions can drown out the original creator’s story. By showing the receipts, he hopes that at least a few more people will know where the elegant curves of Ouros truly came from.
The clock can’t be turned back. The puzzle minigame will remain inside Zenless Zone Zero, where millions of players might never learn its real origin. But in the quiet corners of Twitter, Bluesky, and indie discords, a video timestamped May 2026 stands as a small monument to creative ownership. It’s a reminder that behind every clever mechanic, there’s often a lone developer who sketched it out during a game jam years ago, dreaming of someone playing it—not copying it.
For now, both miHoYo and Kamm remain silent on any next steps. Requests for comment have gone unanswered. The indie community watches closely, knowing that today’s overlooked puzzle could be tomorrow’s billion-dollar feature.
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