PRESENTATION:
Its a very minimal game, monochromatic and very easy on the eye. The real eye-candy here is with the mazes, more on those later.
Options and in-game menus are easy to navigate, and there is nothing fancy to distract the eye during play, which is all the better for the kind of gameplay that it involves.
The music sucks however. It is elevator music, plain and simple, and you'll be reaching for the MP3 player plugin for the PSP pretty quickly. Thankfully you can drop the background music volume right down.
GAMEPLAY:
Echochrome is a routefinder game at heart. Like Cameltry, Spindizzy and to a lesser extent Katamari, Echochrome requires you to work your way through a maze, completing objectives. Seems simple enough.
Now the objective in the game is to get your character - a mannequin who is referred to in the English manual as "The Walker" - to complete some objectives within the maze. These objectives are as simple as collecting fuzzy man-shaped shadows called Echoes (the game's checkpoints) to getting like-coloured pairs of Walkers to meet up. There is no time limits as such (thankfully).
The problem is that you do not have control over The Walker at all, you have control over the maze itself. The Walker will move along the paths available until he hits a dead end, where he'll turn around and go back the way he came. If he drops off the map via a hole, then he'll respawn at the hole. You can press Triangle to put the game into Thinking Mode, where the walker will stop, and you are free to spin and rotate the camera to look for the next route.
There is a twist however. The mazes aren't your simple two-dimensional jumble of pathways like the hedge mazes you find in many botanical gardens. In Echochrome, the mazes are 3D optical illusions inspired by the works of M. C. Escher, the artist behind the famous multiple stairwell piece of art. You have control over the maze itself, rotating it through all angles. That's all very well and good, but how does an optical illusion make a game?
The in-game mazes and The Walker's movement are controlled by five simple physics-bending rules:
- Perspective Travelling: If two seperate pathways appear to be touching, then they are.
This means you can bridge gaps in walkways by maneuvering the camera until it looks like they are joined together (and the game will merge them together graphically). It has interesting applications for route-building - you can link platforms that appear to be nowhere near each other by some clever camera trickery. - Perspective Landing: If a platform appears to be below another, then it is.
- Perspective Jumping: When The Walker hits a jump pad, he will land on whatever appears to be above him.
In the game you'll encounter holes which The Walker will fall through. If you can maneuver the maze so it looks like there's a platform below the hole, you can make The Walker land on distant platforms. And in the same vein, maneuvering the maze so it appears there's a platform above a jump-pad can yield some unexpected results. - Perspective Existence: When a gap between platforms is blocked from view and the platforms appear to be connected, then they are.
- Perspective Absence: If a hole or jump-pad is obscured from view, it does not exist.
You can often "create" new walkways by obscuring gaps in platforms, by moving the maze so a platform is blocking the gap. And likewise you can remove the threat of holes by moving the camera so that there is something blocking the view.
LONGEVITY:
You have two main game modes, the first is Infinity where you play a set of randomly selected mazes, and the second is Box, where you can take on a selection of mazes of your choosing. You also have Canvas, where you can make mazes and share them via Ad-Hoc. This game is HARD. Seriously. Even the simplest of mazes will take at least five minutes for even the hardened puzzler to clear, and the mazes quickly become complex, with holes, jump-pads, multiple levels and broken walkways all requiring navigation. The hardest mazes can take ages to clear, and with over 300 of them (on the UMD version, the PSN downloads have between 56 and 96 stages only), you'll be here for ages.
What really amuses me is that, with 3D-based games, people would complain pretty quickly about the camera sucking, that it obscures things, or is unwieldly. Echochrome is a game that requires you to do stupid things with the camera. This game will test the most seasoned of puzzlers. If you like your games a little bit strange and very addictive, give it a go.
Make sure you set aside a few months first. ^_-
Of course I'd still like a US release, but afaik there's been no indication of that (anyone know something I don't?) - nice to have a backup plan.