Echochrome was one of the downloadable games from the Playstation Newtork that were demoed for us at Sony’s Media Day, and from what I saw it looks to be a very tough, but creative game. The concept is really cool; take a 3-dimensional environment, and using the left and right analog sticks, manipulate your 2-dimensional view of it so that your character can pass through to different checkpoints. How does this work? Lets say for example that there’s a gap in the platform you need to walk across. One way to get across would be to turn the environment so that there is another object blocking your view of the gap. The game is all about perspective – it works based on the Object Locative Environment (OLE) coordinate system – which basically means that if you can’t see it, then it’s not there. If you can’t see the gap in the platform, then your character doesn’t know its there and will walk straight across. This is just one of several interesting mechanics used in the game. This preview has a few more:

We played through 4 levels of the game, and after falling off numerous times and with some help from the devs, we were able to get through them all. One of nice things about the game is that there is more than one way to solve each level. A couple of times during the demo, we were able to get to a checkpoint differently than the devs were telling us. Visually the game is very minimalistic – its in black and white and gray – which actually gives it kind of a unique feel. An added touch is the soothing violin music playing in the background which I can only imagine they included to calm everyone down who probably wanted to throw a controller through the screen after falling off the screen repeatedly.

The game is scheduled to launch in Spring ‘08, and should have around 50 levels. Another nice touch is they are including tools to let players create their own levels, and are currently working on a way to share the user created levels over the PlayStation Network.