Yesterday on On The Spot I had the good fortune to demo Echochrome, a unique puzzle game developed by JapanStudio. I played the game for about an hour before the show, trying to get a sense for how the game works so that I could speak competently about it and, hopefully, play it competently as well. I believe I achieved my aim (though you can judge for yourself), but in the process of doing so I caught a glimpse of the true nature of the game. The clean line animation and ascetic aethestic (yes I just wrote that yes I am pleased with myself) belie the aberrant laws of the abstruse universe Echochrome defines and inhabits. I watched a gameplay video and my brain said, hey, that looks weird. I played the game, and my brain said, whoa, I feel weird.

I believe this unsettled feeling is generated by my brain's attempt to reconcile the dimensional nature of the game. On a basic level, the image I see when I play the game is as two-dimensional as the screen I play it on. But my brain's got skills, see?, and it moves right past that and on to conceptualizing the game space. When an Echochrome puzzle loads, it rotates for a brief period before your character starts moving. This rotation reveals a three-dimensional object, with ledges and columns extending along the X, Y, and Z axes. I know rotating the puzzle on these different axes is how I'm going to accomplish my goals, so my brain files this space away as three-dimensional. Everything in its right place.

Then Liney starts moving. Liney is the gender-neutral, imagination-shaming name that I came up just now with for the character that walks around and often falls to his doom. Once Liney is on the move, it starts to become clear to my brain that it may have made a clerical error. While Liney walks to and fro and flies through the air as if inhabiting three-dimensional space, there's clearly something else going on.

In my On The Spot demo, I first have Liney fall through a hole into oblivion. Then, by rotating the space, I cause Liney to fall on a platform that now appears to be positioned below him. A 3D space would have Liney off into oblivion again, but his fall onto the platform indicates that the laws of a two-dimensional space are now in effect. My brain is not a member of the Flipmode Squad and as such does not appreciate this flipping of modes.

But my brain can roll with the punches, and after a few such flips begins to formulate a theory about how things work in the Echoverse. When planning Liney's path, it helps to think in 3D. When Liney's on the move, 2D rules the roost. Sounds simple enough, right? What I'm setting you up for here is that no, it's not that simple. Planning Liney's path (3D) requires that I think in terms of Liney's movement (2D), so the separation my brain is trying to enforce becomes untenable. This is troubling because this very separation is the separation between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, the difference that makes the two distinct. In one, objects are flat. In the other, objects have depth. Echochrome dances between the two like a mischievous jester. The effect of this weirding dance is the blurring and intermingling of the boundaries between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. Do me a favor and read the previous sentence again. That's. Effed. Up.

It's a truly bizarre sensation. At several points, I felt like my brain was travelling down familiar paths of thought only to find that the paths had changed and there was improper signage telling it where to go next. This feeling gradually lessened as I spent more time on that one level and began to feel comfortable with certain ways of moving, but it never fully vanished and came back with a vengeance when I dared other levels. I imagine, given more hours of play time, that it might be possible to train my brain to think echochromally, but even that theory makes my brain shudder a bit. I can't decide if I want more time with the game so I can master its amorphous ways, or if I just want to wrap a blanket around my brain and go bang out some arithmetic.

Bonus Fun Facts

- The artistic presentation of Echochrome reminds me of a book I read as an adolescent, "House of Stairs" by William Sleator. In the book, five teenage orphans are placed in a vast building with no ceiling, walls, or floor, only stairs running in all directions with the occasional platform here or there. The children are simultaneously enclosed by cavernous empty space and exposed by the lack of any privacy at all. The aethestic parallel is clear, but I think the book also messed with my mind a bit in a way that resonates with brain-bending nature of Echochrome.

- I made it through the entire demo without once mentioning M.C. Escher. Lark would be proud.

- When I was a kid, I had a black stuffed animal otter that I named Blacky.