Straight up, this game is broken. Not that it is unplayable, (although the Playstation Move controller does often fight you for the right to control the game), but that its game concept is too open for me to tell if game design actually occurred or not.

If you heard of echochrome before, this game is only vaguely like it. Instead of maneuvering optical illusions, you are changing the source of light in a 3D environment to manipulate the 2D shadows. It is here your character moves automatically as you change the shadows around the mannequin, guiding them to a goal. The same side of a block can be either a floor, slope, or wall, depending on the angle of its shadow. Doing so with the Playstation Move controller is intuitive, and having grasped the game concept, really opens your mind to the possibility of a good time.

There are several hurdles to having a good time.

For one, the ethereal, elegant aesthetic of the first game, with its classical instrumentation and clean monochrome visuals has been replaced with efforts I can only describe as incompetently wrong-headed. This game and the controller it was made to sell were shameless, bone-headed attempts to replicate the success of the Nintendo Wii with a corporation's misunderstanding of what made the Wii a success. Instead of a classy presentation and easy to read gameplay environments, the terribly lit 3D levels are drenched in a patronizing "for kids" aesthetic with all the forced charm of a dentist's waiting room. Slide whistles and xylophones abound, all narrated by a woman using an affectation commonly found in clothing commercials populated with multi-ethnic kids smiling in bland outfits they would never pick for themselves. I had to mute both the narrator and the terribly sound-mixed music to even concentrate on the puzzles, which made the game feel even more uncanny, hearing empty footsteps echoing through levels with barely enough color to match the hallways to a hospital's child ward.

Barrier the second, the "good" puzzles are hidden deep behind dozens of "bad?" puzzles. This applies to both the premade set and the online puzzles. In the premade puzzles, the beginning set was designed for players new to the Move controller, and maybe to games in general. They are simple to navigate, and have such gimmicks as "shine the light in this particular way, and the shadows make a smiley face!". Fine things to do if your player is 4 years old. (Again, not a dig. 4 year olds deserve nice things.) However, the difficulty curve ramps up so slowly many adults may perceive it as a plateau, as only 30+ puzzles in does the game introduce the ability to rotate the level as well as change the light source, rapidly increasing their complexity. I suspect many players would have dropped the game before that point, because those early puzzles are just not engaging.

Online fairs even worse, for completely different reasons. Everyone has the ability to create and upload their own puzzles, and you can attach descriptive stickers to downloaded puzzles you successfully completed. The intention was for players to make puzzles that were tricky, artistic, or warn of mundane experiences. However, the nature of the PS3 system worked against this by virtue of having online achievements. You get one trophy for uploading 5 levels, and another trophy for rating 100 levels.

The result is, people made levels that consisted of one block that could be completed in less than 5 seconds. It is possible to upload the same puzzle multiple times, so many did just that. It is also possible to copy and edit a puzzle someone else made, so many duplicated these 5 second puzzles and reuploaded them. Because trophy hunters wanted to rate 100 levels as fast as possible, they only played the 5 second puzzles, so those are the most rated puzzles on the server. Thus, it is impossible to find any puzzles that were made with any other intention than to be joylessly rushed through as fast as possible. No matter what search parameters you use, they have all been clogged up with this same misalignment of intent.

So, you can stomach the presentation, progressed far enough to have access to all of the game mechanics, and have finally found a puzzle that looks like it will take some thinking. Now its time to fight the game. The Playstation Move controller will lose its calibration just gradually enough in small enough increments for you to resist stopping what you're doing to calibrate it again. The ceremonial lighting of your mannequin to start the level will sometimes not work, or require such a specific angle you can spend a minute squirming in your seat. Where precise movements are required, you can almost count on the game to lose track of the Move for just enough of a second to shift the whole environment and ruin your plans. This gets compounded once you gain the ability to manipulate the environment as well as the light source, as both are tracked by the Move's position, but both "remember" the position of the Move differently, thus causing unpredictable snapping when changing from one mode to another.

But you fought through everything the controller took from you, and are steps away from the goal - too bad, this game actually has an invisible timer that will boot you from the level if you take too long. This is never shown to the player, is inconsistently enforced, and cannot be turned off. Worse, when you die, the game does not reset the timer. So, a solution that you realize from your previous attempt, that should take 2 minutes, can still be failed as you do everything right, because that 2 minutes is still running on the 3 minutes of your previous out-of-bounds mishap, pushing you over that 5 minute mark and starting over again - even though that process looks identical to a simple retry from failure. My play time for this game was greatly inflated due to this feature, until I learned to manually pause and hit the "retry" button after every death, to make sure I had the full time possible for every attempt.

Even every complaint I have filed so far does not strike to the heart of what I meant when I said this game was broken. A particular YouTube channel perfectly demonstrates the flaw of this game's design, that all of its level design can easily be circumnavigated by the game's own mechanics. (This player cleared every level in the game in 5 to 20 seconds!) Through careful observation of the limits of how shadows stretch, it is possible to bypass entire levels and gimmicks with the blandest of cheese, setting your character on a single shadow and maneuvering it like a flying carpet to your destination. Once you realize how this works, which is required for some of the earliest puzzles, you rarely need to engage with the complexity of the later puzzles. The game quickly devolves into a matter of finding the one block that will let you bypass all the others in a process that does not make you feel smart, instead questioning if the level is a puzzle at all.

There are a handful of exceptions that prove the rule, and in those I saw the potential of why this game may have been made. Levels where the objects casting the shadows are more unified in one 2D plane permit less goblin behavior than levels that appear more complex because of their scattered 3D block arrangements; ironically, that complexity provides more tools for you to ignore them. The result makes me question how this game was playtested, if at all.

I played every pre-made level in every game mode because I constantly felt as if I were missing something, as if some greater understanding of the game was barely eluding my comprehension. Some easy changes would have improved the game so much, I felt like their had to be a reason different choices were made. Why didn't they stick with cell-shading for visual clarity on par with the first game? Why wasn't a time limit optional? Why isn't the tracking speed of the light source adjustable? In the end, I could only surmise that feeling arose from experiencing something unfinished on a conceptual level, a glimmer of a game idea wrapped up and shipped in a barely functional product.

In my rating system, 2 stars represent an average, C rank game, and echochrome ii deserves D rank at 1 star, and tempts me for lower. Out of 98 puzzles, I only recall having fun in about 3 of them, interesting as they were. With all the hassle required to play this on a PS3 with a Move Controller and a camera, I cannot recommend anyone go through the bother except to experience how badly Sony tried to copy a product idea it did not and did not care to understand. The cheek of typing "ii" for the numerals to mimic the Wii branding for their i looking controllers - can you believe they were charging $100 for them at launch?