Echochrome

Echochrome

Thanks to the gigantic success of Portal, games based on the warping of time and space to create intriguing puzzles seem to be enjoying a surge of popularity. But while Valve’s mind-bending, first-person-puzzler was set in the richly-detailed laboratories of Aperture Science, Sony’s taking a more Spartan and abstract approach to the concept with their latest development, Echochrome.

Slated for release on both PlayStation Portable and PS3 (via the PlayStation Store) the game has players guiding a mannequin around various wire-frame environments in search of an exit. The game’s clearly been inspired by Oscar Reutersvärd's impossible construction art that twists physics and logic depending on the viewer’s perspective. While you can order the mannequin to ‘stop’ and ‘go’ in Echochrome, almost all of your control in the game comes through manipulating the camera in clever ways. Using the analogue stick it’s possible to rotate your view on any level through several axes. As you do so you distort your perception of it via perspective and create new pathways for your character to follow.

So, for example, there might be a walkway with a gap in the middle which prevents your mannequin from crossing. Viewed from most perspectives it’s impossible to traverse. However, on a lower level in the environment there is a tall column. If you rotate the viewpoint in such a way that the top of the column appears to bridge the gap in the walkway then your character will be able to happily walk across unimpeded.

As such, the reality and logic of the environment is secondary to the appearance of the level. By manipulating your perspective on things it’s possible to change the physics and rules of a world and, in this way you must guide your character to the exit: by believing what you see to be truth, rather than viewing the world as it really is.

If that sounds all a little complex that’s because it literally is. The game attempts to make things a bit more straightforward by outlining five core rules. These are: ‘subjective translation’, whereby it’s possible to change perspective to connect paths; ‘subjective landing’, whereby your character will land on top of whatever appears to be below; ‘subjective existence’, whereby you can't see it but there is a path, ‘subjective absence’ where if you hide the hole it no longer exists and, finally, ‘subjective jumping’, where it’s possible to make gigantic leaps with a simple perspective shift.

The key word in all of this is subjectivity. If you a objective-minded player then you’re going to find Echochrome a living nightmare as it won’t obey the rules upon which our own existence is founded. However, with extensive user creation tools to allow budding designers to create and upload their own levels, those who look at a picture and say what they see might just find Echochrome the kind of innovative playground they’ve been looking for.