Have you finished every level of echochrome on the PSP? Getting bored with the puzzle creator? Later today, an expansion pack is coming to the PlayStation Store to that will bring 40 more levels to the MC Escher style puzzle game.
Personally, I’ve moved on from echochrome. It was a lot of fun for a while, but I’m not sure I’d want to pay another $4.99 for more levels.
It is good to see PSN and PSP getting nice attention for quality games, though. Will you be picking this one up?
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.
Echochrome is coming soon. We played it at Sony’s Gamer’s Day a couple months back and loved the intricacies of the puzzles. There’s a demo out now for both the PS3 and PSP on the Japanese PlayStation Store. Go grab it if you want, it’s well worth it (yes, it’s in English). Check out some MC Escher style gameplay.
In Japan, the PSP version of Echochrome costs double that of it’s PS3 counterpart. You can grab the PS3 version for 1,800 yen ($17), while the PSP version will run you 3,980 yen ($37). While some might contribute this to needing to print discs and manuals, there really is another reason.
The PS3 version is technically called Echochrome: Jokyoku (Echochrome: Prelude in English). In this version, you’re only getting 50 puzzles. The full PSP version contains 100 puzzles with multiple modes, one of which has you avoiding walking over dark echoes. Don’t fear though, as both versions have Canvas mode for creating and uploading your own levels to the PlayStation Network.
The game is hard as hell, based on everything we’ve played so far. While at Sony’s Gamer’s Day, no one was able to get past level 8 or 9 on the PS3. So don’t feel like you’re missing too much if you don’t want to pick up the PSP version.
No pricing has been set for North America yet, but I’m expecting it to be somewhere close to that of Japan. We’ll keep you posted when more information becomes available.
[via Siliconera]
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:
