What Would It Be Like to Play Inside an M.C. Escher Sketch?

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I did my best to run through the tutorial of Echochrome. It’s a game that came with my new PSP 3000. The music is actually really cool. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live inside of an M.C. Escher drawing, Echochrome will show you.

Echochrome requires the player to control a moving character – which resembles an articulated wooden artist’s manequin – to visit, in any order, particular locations on the surfaces of collections of three-dimensional shapes. The locations to be visited are marked by shadows (’echoes’) of the moving character. When the last marked position has been visited, one further echo appears which must be reached in order to complete the level: scoring is simply a matter of timing completion of each level (or a ‘course’ containing several levels).

However, the character cannot be directly controlled by the player: it moves autonomously, following a path along the surface of each shape in a manner which keeps the path’s boundary on the character’s left (that is, in order of preference, turning left, proceeding straight ahead, turning right, or turning back on itself).

The unique aspect of the game is that the path can be altered merely by rotating the shapes and viewing them from a different perspective: for instance if a gap or obstacle is obscured, the character will behave as if the path continues behind the object which currently obscures the gap or obstacle from view. Similarly, if discontinuous shapes or parts of the same shape appear, from the chosen camera angle, to form a continuous path, the character will traverse from one to the other.

Although the character cannot step off the surface of a shape, there are certain points where it may jump off or fall. It then falls downwards to whatever appears to be below it, or off the bottom of the screen to be rematerialized at a previous position. This behaviour forms one of the most compelling aspects of the game because the player must deliberately interpret the three dimensional world as if it were two dimensional in order to determine where the character will land.

The game is totally worth trying, and buying. If you’re into puzzles, or are a fan of M.C. Escher… you’ll want this game. I probably wouldn’t have bought the game if it hadn’t come with my PSP. I would not have known how much fun it is, and then I’d have lost out. I’m very happy I have it now.

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