Have you ever seen the drawings of M.C. Escher? He specialised in drawings which were actually optical illusions. When you first saw them, they looked fine – ‘Oh look – People walking up some stairs in a lovely tower – How quaint’ – Then you suddenly realised – ‘Wait a minute; How can those folks always be walking up, and those other folks always walk down?’ I mean, the drawing looked normal, but looking closer, you realised there were some strange things going on. The world of Escher’s drawings used rules which don’t exist in our world.

Now we have a game that seems to be inspired by the optical illusions that Escher brought to the world all those years ago…

The game appears at first glance to be deceptively simple. You simply move the landscape by using the left thumb-pad, in order to get your mannequin to walk to a certain goal. Kind of like Marble Blast or Mercury, where you manipulate the landscape around the object your trying to get to the end of a level.

Very quickly though, you’re introduced to 5 very special laws that apply to the world of Echochrome…

Perspective Travelling – When two separate pathways appear to be touching, they are

Perspective landing – If one pathway appears to be above another, it is

Perspective existence – When the gap between two pathways is blocked from view and the pathways appear to be connected, they are

Perspective absence – When a hole is blocked from view, it does not exist

Perspective jump – When the mannequin jumps, it will land on whatever appears beneath it

So, Echochrome is a game of perspectives, and YOU control the perspective. Let’s look at a simple example. Your mannequin is walking along a path. Up ahead is a gap and then another path continues on the other side. There’s a column in the picture. If you tun the landscape so that the column covers up the gap between the two paths, then by the law of ‘Perspective Existence’, that gap no longer exists, and your mannequin simply walks to what was the other path, because there is now no gap. When you move the landscape again, the gap can be seen, and now exists again in the world. Simple!!!

Of course, the puzzles involve you manipulating the environment in a number of different ways as all of the laws exist on any given level. This gives you a good amount of flexibility when deciding how to complete the puzzle you’ve been assigned. In fact, for each puzzle there’s no set way to do it – It’s completely up to you. After you’ve completed a puzzle the game goes straight into replay mode, so you can see for yourself just how clever you were.

Expect your little mannequin to fall off heaps, as you experiment with how the laws work in the game. There’s no penalty falling of edges, and you simply re-spawn and continue.

Echochrome is a game for those wishing for some serious cranium-bending. There no time pressure to speak of, and if you’re patient and like the thought of trying to imagine a slightly different dimension to what you currently know, then you’ll reap a lot of satisfaction from this game.

As you can see from the screens, the graphics are minimalist to say the least. The music is peaceful. It’s easy to solely focus on the puzzles in this game.

There’s an absolute heap of gameplay in this title. Over 350 puzzles come with the game straight off the disc. And of that’s not enough, you can have inbuilt engine design a random one for you. And if that’s not enough – you can design your own levels using the tools the developers used to create the game.

Potentially this could be an awesome community feature, but unfortunately this is not a feature with the PSP version, apart from sharing levels via ad-hoc mode.

Overall, I really enjoy this game. It’s a great distraction when you want a quick 5 minute burst of something to really stretch the mind. Or you can really apply yourself for hours at a time. Just be careful when you’re painting the roof though – Remember these 5 laws don’t exist in real life!!

The game comes in two versions. The retail UMD disc which is the bees-knees, and the slightly cut-down version called Echochrome Micro, which is available for download via the Playstation store.

Tags: Games, Sony

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Games, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.