Edge: Echochrome’s Haunting Beauty
Edge writes: "There is something haunting about the posable wooden human figures designed for artists. The head a smooth blank mask; expressionless and sexless, the human body reduced to its geometric essence. Echochrome’s protagonist is one of these mannequins, hinting perhaps at an allegory of the relationship between player and game. The wooden doll in the artist’s shop is a mere tool, a puppet to be manipulated in the service of a project about which it knows nothing.
When you play a videogame, are you an artist manipulating your digital wooden puppet as you like on the screen? Or are you instead the puppet itself, led by the nose through a series of arbitrary contortions according to the artist-designer’s purposes, in a weightless dance that soon fades into nothingness? ‘Congratulations’, the game says at the end, ‘you adopted all the poses that were required of you. Now you can climb back into your cardboard box until the next time’."
