I used my randomly-forged Japanese PlayStation store account to download the Echochrome demo today for PS3. I also snagged the PSP demo, but was unable to check it out due to aforementioned forged Japanese account – the software instructed me that installing it under Nerfgun-san rather than Nerfgun would nuke my North American “certificate”, which of course means the PSP would be unable to find employment and die alone and destitute. I can’t have that.

Echochrome plays much as the videos say it does – solving a series of black-and-white Escher-inspired perspective drawings that are technically impossible in Euclidean geometry. The only control you have is over the camera. While quite mind-bending at first, the demo does a great job of walking you through the “five mysteries” of the game at the outset and you quickly acclimatize to the odd 3D/2D translation you must do in your head to make it work. All the while soothing YoYoMa cello music plays in the background, making the entire enterprise feel quite cerebral and scholarly. It’s like the polar opposite of Madden. The kind of game where you don’t blink for an hour.

I did have some trouble with the camera, which does not bode well at all since that is the entire control scheme for the game. At certain points it seemed like it was trying to help a little bit, which had the opposite effect. You must join up the edges fairly precisely, there’s not really any snap to it, so when you line up a nice bit of walkway for your poser-hero and then the camera shifts of its own accord, you rightly want to hurl something sharp. Wasn’t a big deal, it only happened twice but it immediately pissed me off. I hope there’s some setting in Japanese that I can’t read for Camera Assist=NO.

The demo is in Japanese with English voiceovers in the tutorial, so not so hard to figure out. If you have access, I recommend it.

Have to say though, a bit disappointing that the PS3 version doesn’t seem to support Remote Play; and the PSP version has twice as many maps as the PS3 one. The PSP is really where you want a game like this in the end…but it just looks so damn sharp in HD.