The first time I saw M.C. Escher’s work was at Epcot Center in Florida when I was six years old. My Uncle pointed out some of his work in paintings and on shirts in a gift shop and that was it; I’ve been fascinated ever since. You have stairs going in every direction allowing for your perspective of the world to wander in every direction. echochrome is the digital equivalence of that feeling. Available for both the PS3 and PSP, echochrome puts you in control of the perspective to solve a multitude of puzzles.
The graphics in the game are very simple. You have a black wire frame structure floating in the middle of the screen with a stark white background. The character is made in a similar fashion with contrasting echos on the maze that you must reach. The menu system is easy to navigate and retails the high contrast black and white feel. To stay with the minimalistic theme, the sound in echochrome is comprised of a calming classical background track and the echoing sound of your footsteps as you navigate the wire frame pathways. On the PS3, echochrome runs at 1080p and looks fantastic. The game translates very well to the small screen of the PSP, although some smaller areas and zoomed out puzzles are more difficult to see.
You may be startled at first when you realize that you do not control your character, but the world around the you. Everything in echochrome is governed by five laws. The first is Perspective Travel. By manipulating your perspective on the world, you can connect two paths that normally wouldn’t intersect. The next is Perspective Landing. If you fall through one of the black holes on the structure, you will fall to whatever seems to be below that hole. With Perspective Existence, you can manipulate the world to block gaps in pathways to make it so they don’t exist. Perspective Absence is similar to Existence except in this law, you block jumps and holes. The final law is Perspective Jump, which is similar (but opposite) to Perspective Landing. When you hit the white wire frame circle, you will jump and land on whatever appears to be above your current location. These laws may seem daunting and confusing, but once you spend a few minutes with echochrome, you’ll be enthralled. There is a nice tutorial when you first boot up the game that both shows you and gives you some hands on to get used to these laws.
To control the world, you use the left thumbstick to change your perspective. On the PS3, you can also use the right thumbstick if you prefer. By holding R1 on the PS3 or the right trigger on the PSP, you can increase the speed in which you rotate the world around you. To ease the transitions in Perspective Travel, you can use the Square button to Snap edges together so you don’t spend too much time trying to line up edges perfectly. The only other controls you have are to pause your character to make him Think with the Triangle button and to make him speed up by holding the X button. Very simple and very effective.
In both versions of the game, there are 56 puzzles for you to solve. The PS3 and PSP each have a different set of puzzles, so you won’t be going through the same motions on both platforms. In Atelier mode, there are broken down into categories of eight, lettered A through G. Difficulty ramps up as you go through each of the eight stages in a lettered section and from letter to letter, as expected. The game also features a Freeform mode where it chooses eight random stages based on the difficultly you select, which is a cell phone signal style bar. No matter which you choose, you have a time limit to complete each stage, which unfortunately is not displayed on screen in the final version of the game. In the builds we played a few months back, the 10 minute time limit was displayed in the upper right corner. The game tracks your best time for completing each stage, so you can go back and try to beat that time or have a friend come over and see if they can do any better.
If the included 56 levels per version aren’t good enough for you, echochrome features a Canvas mode where you create your own impossible puzzles to test your skills. You can copy and edit levels already in the game or start from scratch and see where your mind takes you. On the PS3, you can upload and share those levels with the world. Levels that the developers enjoy are added to the downloads when you first boot up the game and are available to play in Freeform mode. The level sharing is great in theory, but it’s poorly implemented. You can only download levels that the developers set up to share and even still, those levels are only available until the next download set when you boot the game. To go along with this, these levels are randomly inserted into Freeform mode. A lot more thought could have been put into this aspect of the game. If you want to play a level that everyone is raving about over and over, you can’t. Hopefully this is something that can be worked into the game.
With the vast amount of puzzles and the ability to create your own stages, echochrome offers a great deal of entertainment for $9.99. This is one of most innovative games to come out so far this year and one of, if not the best puzzle game of this generation. The only downside of the level sharing, which could use a bit of attention.
Overall: 9 of 10
