The gameplay involves a mannequin figure traversing a rotatable world where physics and reality depend on perspective.

[6] Echochrome requires the player to control a moving character—which resembles an articulated wooden artist's mannequin—to visit, in any order, particular locations on the surfaces of collections of three-dimensional shapes.

The unique aspect of the game is that the path can be altered merely by rotating the shapes and viewing them from a different perspective: for instance, if a gap or obstacle is obscured, the character will behave as if the path continues behind the object which currently, obscures the gap or obstacle from view.

This behavior forms one of the most compelling aspects of the game because the player must deliberately interpret the three-dimensional world as if it were two-dimensional to determine where the character will land.

[7] It was produced under Sony's Game Yaroze program, which had previously launched Devil Dice and the Doko Demo Issyo series.

The PlayStation Portable versions feature different levels from the PlayStation 3 version, with some regions having additional gameplay modes or levels: The music of Echochrome was composed by Hideki Sakamoto at the Tokyo-based sound design company Noisycroak.

Most songs on the game score consist of a string quartet, including two violins, a viola, and a cello.

[14] The composer had originally considered naming the game's tracks after philosophical terminology to match the title's abstract qualities, but later decided to use prime numbers so as not to color the songs with subjective interpretations.