Unusual gifts

With just five laws to adhere to, Perspective Travelling, Perspective Landing, Perspective Existence, Perspective Absence and Perspective Jumping, echochrome for PLAYSTATION 3 and PSP will bend and test your mind with MC Escher style puzzles that are as compelling as the Rubik’s Cube. (more…)

Game of the Month: May 2008

May Showers brings brainteasing titles.

May 30, 2008 - With all the videogames released each and every month, it can be a difficult task to decide on which title to spend your hard-earned money. Granted, you could always go by our review scores alone and weed through the long list of names to find something that scored high or low, but what if you had somewhere else to turn?

Rather than wait until the end of the year for our big award blowout, we’ve created this monthly tribute to the weeks that were. The entire PlayStation Team has come together so that we can tell our readers what we thought was the very best game for each system last month… and why. Though some of us often chime in with our comments at the end of reviews, for the most part, the reviews on IGN are primarily written by one editor. In this feature we had every editor on the channel vote for a single title. What better way to represent a team is there than to speak your collective minds?

How does it work? It’s simple. Any game released in the past month is eligible for the award and is taken through a battery of tests by every editor on that particular channel. After we’ve finished evaluating each game we put our heads together and decide on a single “best of” winner that’s worthy of the title “IGN Game of the Month.” Pretty straightforward, don’t you think?

Now that we have the guidelines out of the way, let’s move on, and congratulate this month’s winner…

Why We Picked It: There aren’t many titles that rearrange your visual perception of puzzles presented to you or the logistics of the game world itself, but echochrome fits that description perfectly. Thanks to the five laws that govern the game, players manipulate platforms to hide gaps or holes, move from one area to the next and other mind bending tricks. With a significant number of stages and difficulty levels, plus the ability to make your own puzzles, this is one title that can keep you busy for an extremely long time.

Runner-Up
R-Type Command
Developed by Irem Software
Published by Atlus

Why We Picked It: It’s pretty hard to take a classic franchise and re-envision it for a new system; it’s even harder to place it in a brand new genre. R-Type Command pulls the battle against the Bydo from its shooter roots and places it into a turn based strategy world. Players now tactically make their decisions against the alien empire, and for the first time are even given the chance to play as the aliens themselves. It’s definitely a unique twist on a familiar series.

Other Games Worth Noting in May:
Nothing

This month might have been light, but next month starts to pick up with a number of large titles hitting the system. Sports fans will take to the links with Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2, while adventure fiends get LEGO Indiana Jones and action lovers get Secret Agent Clank. The month of June gets rounded out with Hellboy and the Disney presentation of WALL-E. What takes the honors for June? Check back next month.

 

Sony’s Echochrome will bend your mind

Echochrome: Puzzle game. Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment. Developer: JapanStudio. (For PS3 and PSP. $9.99 (download only). ESRB rating: Everyone.)

At a time when even the simplest puzzles are dressed up with flashy lights and a thumping beat, Echochrome’s scaled-back approach is striking in its starkness.

M.C. Escher and his impossible structures come to mind, though the game utilizes his concepts rather than his artistry. Stripped of all ornate details, the result is something like Escher by way of Etch A Sketch.

This scaled-down approach in Echochrome makes sense given how all the lines overlap and blend in to one another depending on how you move the game’s camera. By shifting the perspective, you change the properties of the shapes on the screen and create new paths to walk from one point to another.

What you see is what you get. Two previously unconnected L-shapes can overlap and form a square, for example, or a gap ceases to exist once blocked from view by a nearby column. And white and black dots scattered throughout the puzzle force you to jump up or drop down to whatever blocks are immediately above or below, momentarily “flattening” the drawing in the process. It’s the optical illusion as obstacle course.

This shift between 2-D and 3-D has been explored before, most notably in Super Paper Mario and the unfortunately overlooked Crush. But both those games focused on one plane at a time, whereas Echochrome essentially forces you to account for both planes at once, making it the best mindbender of a game since Portal.

It’s a lot to handle, and, on the simpler levels at least, it’s easier sometimes just to jump on a white dot, rotate the camera wildly and hope you end up landing somewhere good. And the lack of direct control over the onscreen figure (beyond telling it to walk faster or altogether) gets frustrating, especially since the game sometimes acts inconsistent to its own rules of perspective.

Early on, the satisfaction that comes from solving a puzzle can be diminished if you just got lucky rotating the camera a lot until the right path emerged. Later the structures are so complex that the impossible geometry looks Lovecraftian in its deviousness. Then you start regretting not thinking things through better when levels were simple enough to grasp how to move from one place to another, rather than simply trying to solve the puzzle outright.

Echochrome is a game that rewards thinking, not simply as a means to an end, but as part of the moment-to-moment experience. I got more enjoyment out of simply forming a new path than I did solving the level itself. In fact, I’d happily spend time wandering through some of the more labyrinth structures - if it weren’t for a three-minute time limit that seems to go against the game’s relaxed approach.

Otherwise, everything about Echochrome suggests that it’s meant to be a laid-back experience. The minimalist lines of the structures seem to float on the empty background, while the slightly grayed-out look of the white appears to be for no reason other than to lessen eyestrain. Even the soothing strings soundtrack - which at times brings to mind a lost Ryuichi Sakamoto composition - plays continuously, drifting from one dreamy movement to another regardless of where you are in the game.

At the end of the day, playing the game would probably result in a good night’s sleep, complete with dreams of walking an endless staircase.

What’s the difference?

Echochrome is available for download at the PlayStation Store for PS3 and PSP systems in two separate versions. Each version contains a different set of puzzles (about 50 each), plus the ability to build and download user-generated submissions.

As for which version plays better, it comes down to personal preference. As a puzzle game, it seems more suited for a play-on-the-go experience on the PSP. Also, no matter the size of your TV, for some, the natural instinct is to have the screen right in front of my face.

Still, the levels have more of an impact on a big-screen TV, and there’s less squinting involved with the more complex puzzles. Also, hearing the evocative soundtrack in 5.1 surround sound is a definite plus.