Echochrome (Hands-on)

By Angus Deacon

Echochrome is a new puzzle game coming soon to the PSP and PS3 that requires you to forget everything you know about logical perspective and three-dimensional laws. Visually the game is brilliantly minimalist and appears completely monochrome with just basic outline renders.

Each map looks reminiscent of a MC Escher painting, the Dutch artist who excelled in optical illusions of stairs that loop on each other and walls that can equally be viewed as ceilings from a different angle. Echochrome uses these optical illusions to create a huge variety of puzzles that you can solve simply by changing the way you view them.

Each level starts with a man who begins walking along a platform. All you have to do to complete the level is to guide him through set markers before getting him back to the starting point. In order to achieve this, you control the camera angle, which essentially rotates the 3d platforms your man is walking on. It sounds simple enough but Echochrome requires a huge amount of lateral thinking.

For example there may be a hole ahead of your man that will result in him falling through and starting again. In order to bypass this hole all you have to do is simply make it invisible. Rotating your viewpoint up, down or left and right lets you angle a different overhead platform to obscure your view of the hole, allowing your man to simply walk over it like it doesn’t exist. Sound confusing? It certainly takes some getting used to and soon you will learn that seeing really is believing.

Another example of a basic puzzle would be crossing a gap between two platforms. Even though you know they are miles apart and on completely different height levels, aligning them so they look connected will allow your man to walk effortlessly across. The concept is similar to holding two fingers out in front of you at eye level so they touch each other at the finger-tips. Then move one of them back about 5cm and close one eye. It appears that they are still touching even though they are at different positions. This principle applies to most of the puzzles in Echochrome.

Obviously as the game progresses, these puzzles become increasingly difficult and start to incorporate other logic defying elements such as jump-pads and bumps. Quick thinking and even quicker analogue stick control (which controls your camera angle) is required to get through them all.

Echochrome is basically identical on both the PSP and PS3 except the levels have different designs and solutions from each other. The game also allows you to create your own mind-boggling puzzles and share them with friends. Although it is a tad repetitive, fans of games like Portal and Lemmings will certainly enjoy having their perspectives broadened (quite literally). However, it will also require patience as the puzzles, even once figured out laterally, can prove frustrating trying to action thanks to the hypersensitive control system. Echochrome will be available as a downloadable game for the PS3 and a standard release on the PSP in June 2008.

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