Echochrome trailer, shots
The new Portal?
You may have heard about Echochrome during last week's Sony conference, but now you can admire the tricky little PSP and PS3 title a bit more, as we've mirrored the trailer and screenshots.
The video's entirely self-explanatory, and ought to plant a grin on any gamer's face. It allows the player to move a tiny character model over broken ledges by rotating the camera so vertical beams obscure gaps, so using differences of perspective to manipulate level design and solve puzzles.
In other words, it takes the opposite approach to a typical physics puzzler, allowing mathematically impossible solutions to work within the tiny, nondescript game engine - a scattering of black lines on a white background.
Comparisons have inevitably been made to the work of M. C. Escher, the Dutch graphic artist who did that Relativity picture with the staircases twisting impossibly into one another.
Whatever the inspiration, the Sony Japan-developed game emerges as one of E3's most interesting prospects. Presumed out this year, although in truth little's been said, the trailer's certainly worthy of a quick watch, and probably the tastiest puzzle teaser since the first time we saw Portal.