PixelJunk Eden

August 5,2008 - It’s a shame that platformers these days have been relegated to just the downloadable or portable realms, but sometimes that works for the best when developers get the chance to push the boundaries of what you’d expect from this declining genre. Q-Games’ third game in the past year is a platformer called PixelJunk Eden, which bills itself as an organic platformer, partly because of its mix fusion of platforming mechanics with its garden-style environments. While PixelJunk Eden certainly brings you in with its great visual style, does it have the addictive gameplay that will keep you playing until you reach its end?

As some of you may now well know, watching videos may not sufficiently explain what you’re doing in PixelJunk Eden; an experience that proves difficult to explain as you really need to play it to truly understand what you’re seeing. You take control of character named Grimp, a combination of “jump” and “grip,” who must destroy Pollen Prowlers to collect their pollen, which is used to pollinate seeds to grow the plants that you need to maneuver around each of the gardens. At your disposal is your tether, which you leave behind as you jump and can be used to swing yourself around the garden, destroy Pollen Prowlers, and collect pollen or time crystals. Your ultimate goal is to collect all five Spectra – which you need to help your home garden grow and flourish – that are located in each of the ten gardens in Eden before your time meter expires. That’s pretty much it, but the game doesn’t stop there.

The gameplay set-up in Eden is that the first time you enter a garden, you’re asked to collect the first Spectra you can find, but the second time, you must collect two Spectra and so on and so forth. While it would have been nice to have a sandbox-style set-up that lets you explore and collect all the Spectra you can at your own pace, that would possibly remove the great difficulty curve and make the game such a short experience compared to what it is now. It’s just downright rewarding to enter a garden for the first time and only be able to explore just a little bit, and then have the chance to spread out more and more until you’re given the task of collecting all five Spectra, which gets really hard as you pass the halfway point in the game. It seems like the system was designed to help you learn the garden more effectively with little pressure at first, and then ask more and more of you as you succeed.

Another great part of Eden is the fantastic level design and introduction of new gameplay elements. Though the first two or three gardens are fairly similar in design and approach, later gardens add new elements and some neat surprises that will catch you off guard and force you to adapt your strategy to how the level’s designed.

On the other side of the coin, in place of the lack of a menu in Eden, you have your own home garden that grows as you collect Spectra. That means that as you collect Spectra in the first garden, plants will grow in your home garden that let you reach the second and third gardens, so it’s really nice to just see what the new developments in your home garden let you reach after exiting a garden. Besides just being a new gateway to the other gardens, the home garden can be where you can freely work on your skills without the pressure of collecting Spectra.

PixelJunk Eden is packed with a variety of ways to play and other means to show off your skill with the game. Like PixelJunk Monsters, Eden offers up remote play to let you take the game on the road if you have a PSP and a WiFi connection. Eden’s the first PS3 game to be release with trophies packed in, which may be mostly bronze, but that doesn’t mean that they’re easy to earn. Another cutting edge feature is the ability to capture up to ten minutes of gameplay to upload directly to YouTube or save to the hard drive and possible export to your PC for further editing.

Those of you with no more than two friends can partake in the three-player co-op, which gives you the ability to catch friends as you swing and help launch them to their destination, though the camera can be an issue if one of you refuses to work together.

As far as visuals and audio go, PixelJunk Eden is just a cornucopia of style. The art style and music were both designed by well-known Japanese artist Baiyon, which definitely shows with the great melding of music and visuals into an experience that is reminiscent of Lumines or Rez. The way collecting Spectras affect the visual style of the garden and the thump of the electronic beat just results in a euphoric experience that is essential to the game. Though there’s not a ton of variety in enemy, plant, and rock types over the ten gardens in the game, the ways in which they are used as you progress through the game really keeps them as fresh as they can be in a platformer.

While PixelJunk Eden may have that wacky barrier that seems to confuse people at first glance, a good thirty minute session with the demo should be enough of a tutorial in how the game works, as seeing really is believing with Eden. This game provides such a unique and interesting experience with addictive gameplay and enough content that will keep you busy for at least a good 15 hours, making the $10 price tag not nearly as much of an obstacle as it is for other downloadable games. Eden’s certainly another notch on Sony’s belt as far as great, unique PSN games are concerned, but it’s also proof that platformers haven’t disappeared yet, they’ve just found a better place to foster their evolution.

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