PixelJunk Eden
Sunday 3rd of August, 2008
As I mentioned last night, my PS3 hasn't seen a huge amount of use as a serious gaming machine. The reasons for this are straightforward enough — there haven't really been any exclusives of interest, unless you're the sort of person who enjoys the hideous controls and mind-numbing storylines of Metal Gear Solid (I'm not). Uncharted was a fun-but-only-once kind of experience, Motorstorm needed splitscreen to keep it going, and Haze was just plain shit. And multiplatform games are basically 360 games as far as I'm concerned, due to the generally lower prices and my controller preference. There's really nothing on the horizon either — until Little Big Planet rolls round, of course.
I do however have a big soft spot for some of the cheap, simple PSN games. PixelJunk Monsters (and its fiendish expansion pack, Encore) has made a particularly large dent in both mine and Kathryn's time. At heart, this game needed to be played by two players, sitting next to each other, preferably with a freshly-brewed cup of tea waiting to be drunk during the post-game postmortem. As such, we were both quite anxious to see whether Q Games' new PixelJunk release, Eden, would provide the same kind of experience — albeit in a totally different setting.
The answer is — wow. Or something like that, anyway. Eden is a difficult game to describe — essentially, it's a physics-based vertical platformer for one to three players, set in a dynamic neon garden and with a pumping minimal house soundtrack. Gameplay-wise, it wouldn't be too unfair to say that it's similar to the ninja-rope part of Worms, without the rest of it. And let's be honest with one another here — we both know that that sounds fucking excellent.
Each player takes control of a small creature called a Grimp (I'm pretty sure they each have a specific name, but I'm writing a moderately confused review here, not fan fiction). Grimps are simple creatures — your movement options are limited to pointing in a direction using the analog stick, then launching them in that same direction by pressing any button. Your Grimp will attach itself to any surface it makes contact with, ready to be launched anew. Additionally, if the surface in question is some variety of plant (to be fair, most surfaces are) there is also the option to remain tethered by a strand of silk, allowing your Grimp to loop around two or three times, launch itself further, or destroy 'enemies'. The enemies themselves are largely peaceful — simple floating blobs which explode at the slightest contact from you or your silk, releasing pollen, which is absorbed into empty 'seed pods' which are all around the levels. When a seed pod is full, you simply propel your Grimp into it, causing it to blossom into a new plant and allowing you to continue your journey upwards.
Your eventual reward comes in the form of Spectra — large glowing collectibles, strewn around the furthest reaches of each level. Touching one causes new growth to appear in your 'Eden' — a We Love Katamari style menu screen, level select, and practice area. The new growth in question allows access to later levels (or gardens), which get pretty weird, pretty quickly. Each garden contains five Spectra, and must be visited five times to be fully cleared . On your first visit, you must obtain a single Spectra, while on your second, you have to find two — and so on (incidentally, this sounds a lot more irritating than it actually is).
So there's my hamfisted attempt at explaining what the general idea of the game is. Onto the more important question — how does it play? Well, the controls were a little disorientating at first — in some cases, it felt like some odd choices had been made. While attached to a plant, there are only really two things you can do — launch yourself in an arbitrary direction, or launch yourself in an arbitrary direction while remaining tethered. Seemingly bizarrely, jumping with silk is accomplished by either tapping any button quickly, or by holding any button — whereas jumping without is handled by holding the same button for a short while then releasing — or double tapping. Confused? As was I — it's not like there aren't enough buttons going spare. However, after half an hour or so you realise that the developer had got it right all along, as your different movements are handled entirely by rhythm rather than different inputs. It's actually a very liberating feeling, which adds greatly to the game's serene sense of inertia.
And when everything works together, the feeling of being 'in the zone' is unrivalled by any other game that I've played in the last decade. The oddly capitalised flOw (also to be found on PSN) was created as part of a thesis researching the eponymous psychological effect. But the first time that everything happens just right — you draw a figure of eight as you launch, attach, swing, then release, arcing lazily across a wide expanse of empty space to land exactly where you meant to — you realise just how far flOw was from acheiving what it set out to.
Of course, even though the basic premise of the game is so simple that you'll either love it or hate it within the first fifteen minutes, there are still problems. The co-op multiplayer, like the control scheme, is surprisingly effective when everything is going well. However, both players (or all three, although I personally haven't tested it with all three players) must remain together on screen, at all times. If one player slips off the edge of the screen, a two-second countdown appears to show their position — and if this reaches zero, they respawn at the other player's current position. So far, so cushy. Unfortunately, this also drains all seeds of half of the pollen they have absorbed — which can be pretty miserable if you've spent several minutes killing enemies in an attempt to progress further, only to be placed back at square one. Even worse is the game's sometimes random approach to which player is leaving the screen area — often in the highest, most difficult to reach areas of the gardens. In these cases, one player will plunge back down the garden, only for the camera to follow them — leaving the game to judge their more stable teammate to have died and respawning them back at the base of the level. Consider this a warning — there may be recriminations. Although that might just be me — I once sulked for a weekend after a sound thrashing on Guitar Hero, so you might find you have better results.
Overall though, Eden was probably the best fiver I spent this weekend — and if you own a PS3, chances are you'd like to play something on it too.
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