Mar 6
Echocrome: First Impressions
The Echocrome demo has just been released on the Japanese PSN. Luckily its a small download and as result of that, a very quick play through as well. For better or worse, I’ve had a chance to play through it and gather some “first impressions.”
The gameplay videos that have been released so far pretty much take away any surprise as to the demos gameplay. You have a playing field, filled with rectangular pathways dangling in freespace, that have gaps, jumps and holes as obstacles as you make your way from “echo” to “echo.” Echos are dark incarnations of yourself, and serve as goals as well as continue points if you fall off the map. You avoid these obstacles by moving the camera’s view point to a perspective that hides the hole or narrows the gap. The perspective controls are a bit difficult to get used to, but I think after about 10 minutes with the game you won’t have any trouble. Already by the end of the demo they were becoming a nil issue.
Although the idea is innovative, “a perspective based puzzler”, I’m undecided if this translates into fun gameplay. The demo puzzles are extremely easy, and this may be part of the problem. As the game progressed and got harder I can see myself becoming more interested, but as it stands, I was more excited about Echocrome before playing the demo. I will have to wait till the full game, and I encourage all to head to the Japanese PSN and give this unique title a try.
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How many levels is the demo? I’d expect a game like this to start off very easy and then ramp up in difficulty. Hopefully that’s the case here.
3 I believe. The tutorial is good, it might have been smart to include 1 intermediate level instead of just the first 3. Its hard to judge the “fun factor” on just the first 3.
Played the demo last night.
I think it was just about right. The only thing I would have added would have been tacking on some of the trailer at the end.
I don’t think that more puzzles were necessary, but it would have good to at least SHOW people what the more difficult ones looked like. I don’t think you’d sell as many copies by stumping people on a hard one.
PS> The camera moves too slow for my taste. There should be a button that you can hold down to speed it up (maybe there was, but I wasn’t aware of it in the demo because I can’t read Japanese).
I found the controls slow, but sort of got used to it. I was hoping one stick could be for fine adjustments and the other for quick, or a toggle button like you suggest would work. The shoulder buttons do something, but I couldn’t figure out what.
I take back what I said about the puzzles being easy. After reading comments on other blogs, a lot of people had trouble with them, so I’ll just assume I’m brilliant.