Shadow play: Sony enters the shadow-game ring with echochrome ii

It all started -- it should be noted -- with Steve Swink and Scott Anderson's Shadow Physics, revealed at the Game Developers Conference's Experimental Gameplay Sessions in 2009, and still in production at their upstart studio Enemy Airship (as yet offline, but already with this amazing logo designed by Phil Fish). After that came Lost in Shadow, Hudson's own upcoming fantasy/storybook platforming take on shadow-play. And now, spotted very briefly at E3 in Sony's PlayStation Network reel, but now shining in a stronger light on their PlayStation.Blog, is echochrome ii, an upcoming downloadable that'll use the PlayStation Move motion controls as a flashlight to modify the game's cast shadows to solve yet more puzzle/platforming levels. Sony's take does, to be fair, appear to be a logical next step from their original optical-illusion puzzler echochrome, but it is a curious case of Hundredth Monkey game design, and will be interesting to see how each makes its own mark as they all come to market.

• [Anonymous]

  That looks incredible. Nintendo incredible.

• [brianary]

  I’ve tried and tried, but I could never get echochrome to work like it was supposed to.

  Hiding walls didn’t always get them ignored, lining stuff up wouldn’t always make the lines disappear, and too often it felt like the “open-ended” puzzles allowed only a proscribed solution.

  I don’t think I’m alone. Search around, and many people have had a hard time getting echochrome to do what it claimed.

  Neat idea. Poor execution, IMO.

• [speonjosh]

  What is wrong with the voice doing the narration? It doesn’t sound quite natural. Either it’s a non-native English speaker who has done an amazing job in eliminating their accent or it’s computer generated. Or the person just has a tongue that is too big for their mouth.

  What is it?

  • [ian71]

    There’s nothing wrong with her voice. So “don’t be a weird boy!”

• [MadRat]

  There was a M. C. Escher exhibit at our local art museum. At the end there was a few interactive items set up for museum goers to play with. One of them was echochrome.

  I saw people playing echochrome and was blown away. A lot like the game above, one or several figures walks along an MC Escher-like building. By rotating the building, the perspective changes. If two parts of the building look like they intersect, then they do! Even if you know there’s a gap in part of the building were the figure is walking, if you rotate it and the gap is no longer visible, the figure can cross the now nonexistent gap. I remember thinking, “What an amazing game, yet no one knows it exists. How can Sony not promote something this awesome?”