E3 2009: Hands on with echochrono on PSP

Like the Escher drawings on which it was inspired, the cerebral puzzle play of download-only echochrome could be seen as a brilliant game or frustrating endeavour . There's one point to be conceded regardless of your view on the game and that's it's uniqueness. That inventive spirit yields a successor in echochrono, another frustratingly brilliant puzzler that is sure to tickle some brains and have other scratching their heads.

Where echochrome toyed with perspective in the pursuit of solving platform puzzles, echochrono manipulates time. You control a marionette using the analog stick to move through two dimensional levels. Switches, jump pads, holes, and stairs act as obstacles which you overcome using echoes of your marionette. You don't complete levels in one go; instead, you employ echoes of your marionette across time to solve these unusual puzzles.

You're given 30 seconds to move before the marionette turns into an echo and you're given reign over a new one. As you control the new marionette, the previous one retraces your commands. Take one of the game's early stages, for example. A pathway with two gaps could be bridged by activating switches located on a walkway directly underneath. The first marionette can be used to trigger the first switch. Once the clock runs down, you move a second marionette to the second switch. Now that the bridge is complete, you take a third marionette across the pathway to the exit door.

Things become tricky in later stages when time grows tight. Jogging down a flight of stairs may eat up precious seconds needed to move a marionette in place over a switch. echochrono therefore brings together the cerebral elements of puzzle-solving with the active gameplay of a platformer. Utilising holes to drop your marionette to a lower level or a jump pad to launch it up to a switch can mean the difference between solving a stage with a couple marionettes versus a handful.

Each of the game's 63 levels are assigned a par, which denotes the limit to how many marionettes can be used. You're able to exceed that limit, though officially completing the level requires achieving par. Advanced stages stress the importance of efficiency, taxing your ability to use echoes to solve increasingly complex puzzles.

One particularly difficult level presented a straightforward task: walk a marionette across a high bridge by flipping three switches on a path below. The trick, however, came in timing activation of the switches; with only 30 seconds with which to position each marionette, timing the echoes properly so that the final marionette could walk across the bridge without the ground underneath it disappearing.

Many of the more complicated tricks are addressed in a welcome dossier of tutorials. From the main menu, you can access 16 in-game videos that address common situations and display solutions for you to try. It's something that was missing from echochrome and should help nudge you through those difficult sections. And stuck you will be when this unique mind-bending puzzler hits in the fall.