Video Games M.C. Escher Would Love

You might not realize this until you get poked in the eye, but sight’s pretty great. It’s not just what allows us to move about a space confidently but also, in the words of a cliche, what you need to do with something before you can believe something.

But our sight is not impervious to failure, it turns out. As our eyes fervently attempt to establish relationships with the environment, they fall prey to illusions of pattern and continuity within that space, glitches in the brain’s visual processing. These deceptions are granted power in Echochrome, a spatial puzzle game by Sony’s Japan studio in which a player’s stationary two-dimensional perception of space becomes the true nature of that space. That is to say, if you rotate your on-screen perspective to make it look like two separate structures are connected, that perceptual bridge has become an actual bridge, and your character can assuredly – impossibly – cross it.

Empowered visual deception is also a large part of Alexander Bruce’s Antichamber (formerly Hazard: The Journey of Life), which was shown at this year’s Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. The game’s introduction is, like the M.C. Escheresque title that preceded it, a visual re-education exercise. Bruce says it serves to help the player “un-learn” all the things they have grown to expect about virtual environments. Specifically, expectations relating to existing perceptions of such dependable things as linear space, physics, consequences and the role of the environment itself.

Once these prejudices are disposed of, moving about Antichamber becomes a euphoric, labyrinthine head-trip, messing with your psychology far more than any amount of shooting guns at virtual people can. And there’s more on the way. Polytron’s highly-anticipated platformer, Fez begins with a realization that its seemingly two-dimensional game world is actually three-dimensional. Marc Ten Bosch’s award-winning game Miegakure goes even further, into the 4th dimension. With games beginning to more frequently offer strange and unexpected experiences, it’s nice to see “perceptual reality distortions” ranked firmly among the genres and concepts being explored.