A few years ago, Guinness ran a series of logic-defying, monochrome TV ads that included a film of a fish riding a bicycle. The campaign's tagline was 'not everything in black and white makes sense' and it's one that could be attached just as appropriately to Sony's echochrome, because the title combines an amazingly clever concept and arresting visual style but somehow manages to fall just short of doing so in a way that creates a perfect puzzle game.

There's no denying that echochrome is slightly pretentious, but it's also sophisticated enough to back up the air of pomposity it sets wafting around your PSP. It's like an interactive exhibit from Tate Modern that exists in a vacuum where it can patent its own ideas on the laws. The way it does this is by bending the rules of Einstein's Theory of Relativity to the point where E = M.C. Escher. Every level is like an installation. A giant, three-dimensional space with a brilliant white background. Hanging in the void are the perfectly straight, millimetre thin, wire frame outlines of a series of platforms - the whole thing looks like the work of the world's greatest Etch-A-Sketch artist. On one of the platforms stands a mannequin. This character is your ward and, in the game's easiest mode - Solo - it's your task to guide him (or her, or neither) around each level 'encountering' as the game puts it, 'walking into' as most people would say, the echoes - static ghosts scattered across the platforms. The last of these echoes, which only appears once the others have been touched, also doubles as the exit.

Before you can begin to think about turning off the lights on your way out however, a couple of rather large problems face you. Not only does your mannequin lack the natural ability to jump the huge horizontal and vertical voids between some of the platforms, but apart from using the triangle button to stop him dead in his tracks to allow you time to think, you have absolutely no control over him whatsoever. He just continues to walk forwards until he reaches a dead end, at which point he performs a precise turn and heads off in the first available new direction; all the time with the click, click of his footsteps sounding out a death march as the time limit runs out on you. This, though, is where the real wonder of echochrome begins because, to borrow partly from an old adage, in this game it's possible to change something simply by observing it from a different angle - and it's the precise angle you choose at any time that's the key to success.

By giving you control over the camera rather than the mannequin, you can make full use of the fact that, in this imaginary world, reality is a malleable concept. Allow yourself to change your perspective and you'll find that some rules can be bent, while others can be broken altogether. Using the analog nub or the direction buttons to move the camera around, if you can make it look from your view like two platforms a distance apart are, in fact, next to each other, then you can join these together and the mannequin can pass from one to the other, covering a vast gap with a single step. It's a similar story with the white jump pads and black holes that are present on some platforms. Changing your angles so that it seems that another platform is directly above a pad, or below a hole, allows the mannequin to use the feature in question to reach it. Alternatively, if a hole or a pad is in the way of your mannequin's progress, if you can swing the camera around so that you cannot see it, often by positioning another structure in your line of sight to block it out, then, at that point in the game, it no longer exists, and the mannequin will walk straight over it. It's a neat trick and one that can also sometimes be used to obscure gaps between platforms.

It's not a completely new idea. Games such as Crush, which has its home on the same machine as echochrome, and Portal both do a very enjoyable job of medalling with the space-time continuum - but never has a title used the idea with such freshness and simple elegance. The duration of the levels has been perfectly set for a handheld; each one provides a short burst of addictive cerebral intensity and, on the best, you really have to just smile and raise a glass of port, or cup of camomile tea, to the imagination shown by the developers. At the same time though, there's always a serenity through which the game seems to whisper to you that this is a place where your mind can breathe deeply. It's a feeling enhanced by the orchestral mood music and the hushed tones of the female voice who commiserates with you from the ether when you fail - although you might sometimes think that, for endeavours this highbrow, the most appropriate commentator would be Jeremy Paxman, taunting you with his repertoire of phrases such as 'Good Lord, no' and 'Come on', each dripping with his usual disdain.

There are ninety-six levels in total where you can try individually or in groups of eight, with your fastest times saved to leaderboards. If you're finding Sole mode to be a little beneath you then echochrome also provides the tougher Pair option, where you have mannequins to marry up, or the Other mode, where a number of black mannequins roaming the level hinder your mannequin's progress. There's also a freeform setting that just throws Solo, Pair and Other levels at you in a random order, and even a fully fleshed out level creator that some will spend around five seconds with while others will happily lose five hours to with ease.

As you work your way through all of this content, however, some issues start to arise. Many of these seem to concern the fact that there's a degree of precision inherent in a minimalist, physics-distorting puzzler and, on occasion, echochrome just doesn't quite meet this exacting standard. Falling, and especially jumping, is too haphazard, and wayward ventures into the nothingness around the platforms often lead to you missing your target. Rotating the view is also awkward at first and while, by the time reach the later levels, it will have become much more comfortable, the camera never lets you move with total freedom, sometimes refusing to budge any further when you're on the verge of making two platforms into one.

Then there's the square button, which normally carries out the extremely helpful task of snapping together two platforms that you've almost lined up but sometimes just won't oblige, and the way the mannequin seems to take a short, but often vital, distance to stop when you tap the triangle button. It's enough to make you scream at it "What's the rush, did you forget to turn the cooker off?" The greatest sins though are that, on occasion, even though it looks like you've joined two platforms together, your mannequin doesn't recognise this, and that, when given a choice of directions, he always seems to choose the one you don't want - but perhaps this last fault is more with player paranoia than any intentional divisiveness on the part of your little friend.

There's no doubt that there's nothing quite like echochrome out there and, for a second, it seems a little strange that the picture on the front of the game's box is of a young woman's head with a series of clouds above, each containing a shot of an echochrome level. That is until you realise that Sony has obviously decided to pitch echochrome at casual gamers, as an uber-cool improve-your-mind title, one that you feel more intelligent just by playing because, rather than some stuffy doctor telling you how stupid you are based on a series of pen and pencil tests, you're triumphing over Brian Training meets the Turner Prize. In this respect, echochrome is a wonderful success. The thing that stops it short of the perfection it's aiming for though is that it's like a magic trick. Initially you'll stumble around, stunned and trying to take in how it all works, but as soon as you get it, you cross that invisible line from audience member to magician, and, while the pleasure of the ingenuity remains, the magic is gone.

Reviewed by James Hamblin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).