Title echochrome Date 05.12.2008 Genre Puzzle Platform PlayStation 3 Developer Japan Studio Publisher SCEA

No Cover Art Available

Overview
Without a doubt, echochrome is one of the most unique games to be developed in the past decade. For anyone who's ever looked at an M.C. Escher painting and thought, "wow, that's pretty damn cool," this is a must-have game. echochrome is a puzzle game that relies on moving a small humanoid figure through a simple three dimensional level, past several obstacles which are overcome by altering the player's perspective of the level. I think we can all agree that not only is this a very, very cool concept, but it's also precisely the kind of idea that would be nearly impossible to pull off.

Luckily, JapanStudio managed to make the idea work. There are a few hiccups in the design, but, all things considered, echochrome is a fantastic game.

Gameplay
echochrome is divided into three distinct modes of play: freeform, atelier and canvas. The object of the game is to move a figure called, simply, the character, around a level to find mirror figures called shadows. The character resembles a white humanoid figure—I'm unsure of the exact name, but if you go into any art supplies store, you'll see identical-looking wooden figures that artists use to help them draw correctly-proportioned human beings in differing poses. The shadows are essentially inverted characters, so they appear completely black, and wreathed in a black fog. Each level has anywhere from 2-5 shadows in it, which the character must eradicate by passing through them.

The character will move on its own in the game, but the player can either speed up the character's movement by holding down on the cross button, or force the character to halt and, "think," by pressing the triangle button. The levels are often fairly complex, and require the player to alter the perspective of the game frequently for the character to move about. The rules that govern this mechanic number five, and are easily explained in the in-game tutorial that starts automatically the very first time you open the game.

The first rule is perspective traveling. Basically, if there are two paths that are not connected, you can connect them by altering the camera angle so that they appear to be connected. It sounds tricky, and is virtually impossible to describe with words, but once you see it in the game, it's actually quite simple.

The second rule is perspective landing. When the character comes to a dead end, it will simply turn around. There are holes in the terrain which (following the minimalist art design) appear as black circles. When the character walks over a hole, the character will fall, landing on whatever appears to be directly below. As with all of these laws, it is fairly simple in practice, and once you see it you'll get it in no time, but it's very difficult to fully explain with text alone.

The third rule is perspective existence. Essentially, only what you see from your perspective exists, so if there is a gap in the terrain, you can remove the game simply by hiding it. "You may not be able to see it, but there is a path." As with all of these laws, it is fairly simple in practice, and once you see it you'll get it in no time, but it's very difficult to fully explain with text alone.

The fourth rule is perspective absence. Though the game declares this to be a fourth rule, it's essentially the same as the third rule—if you cover something up, it isn't there. If you don't see it, it doesn't exist. Whereas the third rule applies directly to gaps in the terrain, the fourth rule applies to holes and jump-pads. Cover up a hole, and the character won't fall. Cover up a jump-pad, and the character won't jump. As with all of these laws, it is fairly simple in practice, and once you see it you'll get it in no time, but it's very difficult to fully explain with text alone.

The fifth and final rule is perspective jump. The fifth rule is, essentially, the opposite of the second rule. There are jump-pads in the terrain which (following the minimalist art design) appear as white circles. When the character walks over a jump-pad, the character will leap into the air, landing on whatever appears to be directly above it. It may sound a little tricky, but, as I've repeated, it's actually quite simple once you see it in action.

In addition to the game's "five rules that govern the world," there are two other laws you'll want to keep in mind. First, the character will always turn left at any intersection. Second, the last shadow in any level will always appear at the precise point on the level where the character started the game. Another thing to keep in mind is that, though the character will constantly be moving about, the shadows are stationary.

Now that we've gone through how the game is played, let's talk about the three different modes of play. The first mode is called freeform. Freeform play jumps the player directly into the game, playing through a random assortment of levels. In freeform, you'll never know which level you'll get next, nor will you know how complex it will be. The random levels include everything from the very simplest levels, to the absolute hardest, and even, should you choose to download new content when you first load the game, selected levels from the developer. The latter of which I'll talk about a bit later, under difficulty & replay content.

The second mode is essentially a more structured version of the first. Rather going through a random number of levels, here, the player can choose whichever level he or she wants to play. There are a total of seven tiers of difficulty, labeled A through G, with A being the easiest tier and G being the most difficult tier. Each tier contains a total of eight levels, for a grand total of fifty-six. In addition to the fifty-six official levels, there is also a portfolio folder (accessed by pressing the R1 button) which can contain up to 104 user-created levels. If you fill up your portfolio, it's possible the game might expand the number of slots (I haven't filled up all 104 slots, yet) but if you cannot, it's quite easy to delete old levels. I'll go into more depth about user-created levels in the difficulty & replay content section.

The third and most interesting mode of play is the "canvas," which serves as a level editor, allowing players to construct their own intricate levels to play, personally, or to swap with friends. Players are essentially given a massive cubic area, measuring 38 by 38 by 38, allowing for some very large levels. Player can then place anything thing they want, anywhere they want, by moving a red cursor from cube to cube, selecting the terrain they wish to place where the marker stands.

Moving the red marker in the canvas mode can seem a bit tricky at first, because it follows certain laws of perspective just as the gameplay does. The red marker can only move in two dimensions, which are always visible to the player by the four red arrows coming out of the marker. By altering the perspective of the canvas, players can change which two dimensions the red marker will move. It's really quite simple. The player can put anything he or she wants, anywhere he or she wants. Flat terrain, stairs, jump pads, and holes. The player is, however, restricted to no more than one character in a map, and no more than four shadows. Remember, if you place four shadows in a level, that means the total number of shadows will be five—because the last shadow will always be at the point where the character starts.

For the most part, everything in the game works the way it's supposed to. The camera has some very odd limitations—you cannot, for example, look at any level from a strictly horizontal perspective: the camera will always snap a few degrees up or down. I would imagine this as an intentional, albeit strange, method to prevent abuse of the second rule, perspective traveling. For the same reason, I imagine, the height of the camera, too, is limited. You really only have complete freedom with the horizontal rotation, which is a shame, because the game could have a whole lot more potential with a totally-free camera. Toss in the lack of a zoom function, and you've got a camera that is serviceable, but little more.

The biggest detracting element of the gameplay would be, unfortunately, the first rule of perspective in the game, perspective traveling. When you've lined up two areas for perspective traveling, the black lines separating the two disappear—so what you see appears to be a single piece of terrain. Sounds pretty cool right? It is—when it works. Even when the line is removed, it doesn't mean the game will recognized the joined areas as one single area—rather, if everything is not lined up perfectly, the game will read it as two, separate areas, each missing and edge. That means that rather from moving from one platform to the other, the character will simply fall. It's not a big problem—once you get used to it, you'll take the time you need to line everything up perfectly—but it's a problem that shouldn't be there.

Difficulty & Replay Content
It's virtually impossible to measure the difficulty of a puzzle game, particularly one like echochrome that relies so much on spatial awareness. Unfortunately, the game demo currently available on the PlayStation Network only features the game's tutorial levels—which, for me, were exceptionally easy. I would recommend playing through the demo: if you're having a hard time with the tutorial levels, you'll have a much harder time with the game—and will likely end up perpetually frustrated with it. If, on the other hand, you find the levels easy, simply ask yourself whether or not you would be interested in applying the gameplay mechanics to much, much larger, much, much more complex levels.

Echochrome offers only fifty-six pre-designed levels fresh from the servers, which may seem paltry at first—and it kind of is. Several of the easier levels can take less than thirty-seconds to complete. The harder levels, however, can take much longer, depending on how acute your spatial awareness is. That being said, once you've figured out a level, there's very little challenge left in re-playing it again. Once you've finished all 56 levels, there's not a lot of reason to replay now. Now, the game does keep track of how long it takes the player to finish each level, so you can re-play levels in an attempt to beat your previous times.

For a measly $10 USD, fifty-six levels feels just about right, but echochrome really goes all out when it comes to replayability. The game has a, "canvas," feature that allows players to design their own custom levels! The level editor, while a bit daunting when you first get into it, is actually very simple once you grow accustomed to it—and getting accustomed to it hardly takes any time at all. The key to remember is that the editor, like the game itself, relies on shifting the perspective of the image to fully work. You'll learn the basics in no time, and be able to master the editor in less than an hour. To be perfectly frank, I'm having a lot more fun actually designing and testing my own levels than I am playing with the pre-designed levels packaged with the game.

Lastly, every time you boot the game up, echochrome will prompt the player whether or not he or she wants to download new content. New content is, essentially, special levels distributed to the players via the developer, which are inserted randomly into the atelier mode. These levels, more often than not, are hit-or-miss. Sometimes you'll get one that's genuinely cool and fun to play—other times you'll find yourself in a very large level that seems like it might be cool, but where you can beat it in seconds simply by holding down the cross button.

Thanks to the level editor, the replay value of echochrome is, essentially, infinite. You can not only design your own levels to play, you can also swap levels with your friends. Unfortunately, the method by which levels are swapped is pretty clunky. You have to send one map at a time to one person at a time, and if you want someone else to send you a level, you'll have to arrange the transaction somewhere else, as there is no lobby feature to the game. None of this would be a problem if there were an easy way to swap levels on a PC. Ideally, all of the levels a player would make would be stored in a special folder on the XMB, from which players could transfer (in bulk) the level files to and from the PC. Unfortunately, that's not the case, so we can only hope for a patch sometime in the near future to improve the functionality of level-sharing.

Audio
This section, I'll tell you straight-out, is where you'll find the most bias on my end. I love classical music—and I absolutely adore the sound of a violin. The game follows a minimalist-driven design in virtually every aspect. There is very little text (there aren't any capital letters at all) and there's very little spoken dialog. The music, while only one track, has a layered sound that's very soothing and relaxing, yet avoids the pitfall of being too slow or boring. It really does sound quite nice.

The few bits of spoken dialog in the game (mostly in the tutorial) are spoken by a very artificial-feeling feminine voice, in perfect English. When I say perfect English, I do mean perfect. There's not a trace of an accent to it—if anyone has heard the voice that the computer systems have in Star Trek, the voice in echochrome is very similar, but vastly superior in terms of near-human artificiality.

The only other sounds in the game are the sounds of the character's footsteps, and a few other sound effects to encounter during the game—the sound shadows make when they disappear, the sound the character makes when it jumps or falls, etcetera. There's not a whole lot to hear in the game, but what there is, is flawless.

Graphics & Presentation
echochrome's graphics are incredibly simple. First, everything is either complete black or completely white (no gradients here!) and, other than the stairs, every single piece of terrain is built out of cubes. Other than the shadows, it's essentially a mess of black outlines. Personally, I find the minimalism pretty cool, particularly in a gaming industry that seems to be prioritizing frame rates, textures, draw-distances and lighting effects over the things that really make game, you know, games—like ingenuity and fun. As I've already tried to intimate, echochrome has heaps of ingenuity and fun. For the most part, the game looks great—hell, even the title menu impressed me. I do, however, have a few qualms with the graphics and presentation.

Playing echochrome at the highest resolution, I've noticed that the character will often grow fuzzy when it runs. This, however, is a minor annoyance, at best. The other small thing I have to mention is that there is no zoom-feature in the levels. This wouldn't be a bad thing, except that there is a zoom to the camera, and it's controlled automatically. Basically, that means that sometimes you'll be playing the game and suddenly find the camera zooming out so far that you can barely see what you're doing. Though it doesn't happen often, when it does, it's quite irritating.

The biggest problem would have to be something I can only attribute to a bug in the mechanics of camera control. Infrequently, the camera will get stuck*. It will either get stuck rotating, or it will stiffen and lock the view from a top-down perspective. When the camera gets stuck, it can be fairly difficult to un-stick it. I've yet to have to restart, but it often requires 20-40 seconds of button-mashing/stick twirling to get the camera back under control. Since the levels do have a time-limit to them, these bugs can force a player to fail the level. Hopefully, this will be addressed in a future patch.

*I've heard that this problem could be attributed to a damaged controller, but to my knowledge my own controller is in perfect condition—it's less than one year old, and works perfectly with all of my other games—and I know that several other players have experienced identical problems. I should continue to stress, however, that such problems are rare, and are NOT a game-breaking experience.

Final Comments
The most important part of any game, more often than not, seems to be the one aspect of gaming that most professional reviewers ignore—the fun. Games are entertainment, right? So the only thing that really matters is whether or not they're fun—and how fun they are. I've had a lot of fun with echochrome, so it gets top marks from me: perfect score. It's a new, imaginative concept in a sea of knock-off and insipid clones. And it's cool. It's damn cool. You alter reality by shifting your perspective. Awesome. If that concept sounds cool to you, you WILL love the game. If that idea doesn't sound so hot, you probably won't be able to drum up very much excitement, and probably ought to stick genre-gaming. You know, games that haven't changed appreciably in years, in every area except graphics.

My biggest problem with echochrome is that you cannot actually buy the game. That is, you cannot buy a physical copy of the game. You use a digital transaction to acquire a digital game. That, however, is a concept I simply neither like nor trust, and has no bearing on the game. I do think—no, I truly believe—that for only $10 USD, echochrome is one of those must-play games, right up there with Starcraft, Okami, The Ocarina of Time, and Persona 3. It's a game that not only epitomizes its genre—it revolutionizes it.

Echochrome is absurdly fun, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Game Score

A-

Reviewed By: Mwulf