Created for the PlayStation 3 by Q-Games

Available through the PlayStation Network for $10

Rated "E" For Everyone

Eden is a netherworld garden of shadow puppet vegetation growing with all the viscosity of digital paint. With the right stimulation, the release of phosphorous pollen, plants “spill” upwards branching out sometimes with trunks like the bold strokes of a paint brush, but often in whisper cracks of ink that unfurl into delicate, decorative leaves. It’s your job to stimulate such growth, and playing as a Grimp, a miniature silk-spinning mite, you must climb and swing your way up through the branches, up, up, towards the sky to collect “Spectras’, floating entities that radiate light like holy shrines to old world gods.

PixelJunk Eden is a very trippy game, one that explores the sensations of trance rather than whimsy. Its soundtrack is composed of electronica music, with thudding beats behind tracks awash in shifting sound, and gameplay that doesn’t flow so much as it ebbs. It’s as slow as it is interesting, repetitive as it is imaginative and strange as it is simple.

I’m not sure what a Grimp is, but it looks like a little brownie or elf, but with two large arms attached to its face. It can leap with all the power of a mite and can spin a silk-like tether from which to swing, Spider-Man-style, from one leaf to another. It’s health bar, or “oscillator” as it is called, drops over time as well as from damage from falls and contact with enemies. To keep the Grimp in action, you must consume crystals scattered across the sky.

The Grimp will automatically attach itself to anything organic, even as you fall from great heights, as long as you can guide its descent towards a leaf or stem, it will latch on for safety. It can’t climb so much as leap from one spot to the next, with you using the right thumbstick to choose your trajectory for each leap. You have the option when you jump of attaching a tether first, and as it tightens you can then swing back and around, choosing either to let go and soar over to a new landing point, or to follow through the swing for a complete 360 degrees, all the way through two rotations before it will break.

Swinging in circles is the best way to defeat Pollen Prowlers, floating puff balls that act as enemies. When you collide with them, they explode into a soft rain of pollen particles, but do damage to your health. It’s much better to swing your tether through them, they still explode, but you remain undamaged. Swinging through the resulting pollen activates them, sending them floating off to the nearest seed, a large empty circle hanging in the sky. As pollen gathers within the seeds, they change from simple circular outlines to solid circle shapes and pulsate. Your next move is to guide your Grimp to jump on the seed, stimulating it to then hatch a new plant to grow and fill the empty space. In this way you create the organic ladders and mountains needed to climb up to the Spectras high above.

As you get further into the garden, you encounter protectors, floating creatures that will attack you in some fashion. Some will simply crowd you, deflecting your tether when you try to use it, others will pepper you with ranged attacks. They’re there to act more as obstacles than creatures to battle with, and to help you quickly escape from such encounters, your Grimp can choose to spin as it falls, allowing it to quickly pass through vegetation without automatically latching on for safety. To immediately fall to the ground, you can physically shake your controller downwards and the SIXAXIS function will send your Grimp rushing quickly to the ground.

The game is composed of many gardens, and for each garden you will be given tasks to retrieve a number of Spectras, one at first, and then two, and so on until you have them all. Each time you enter a garden it resets, so you will find yourself retrieving the same Spectra again and again, from one task to the next.

As you retrieve Spectras, you’ll add more plants to the game’s Start screen and unlock more garden levels. As you progress, the gardens become harder, offering fewer crystals to refresh your oscillator and rocky formations that your tether can’t stick to.

Sadly, retrieving a Spectra is the game’s highpoint and rather anti-climactic. My hope was that as you unlock gardens and collect Spectras, that a more elaborate fantasy or game mystery would unfold, but instead the game merely adds more liquid vegetation to its black canvas. Collecting Spectras can get very repetitive and I found I had to play in short sessions, taking breaks often to play other games, or lose all interest in it.

It is a curious, likeable game, but not one I’ve become addicted to.

PixelJunk Eden offers many technologies that are new to the PlayStation 3. It is the first game to connect with YouTube. You can set the PS3 to record long video clips of your gameplay and then upload them through an internet connection to your YouTube account. It works extremely well, except that PixelJunk Eden, with its micro-sized game characters and action doesn’t show up very well on a small screen, nor is it the kind of game where you will have moments or secrets to share with others, but it proves that it works and I look forward to seeing it used with other games, ones where complex physics engines and secret areas will make the clips worth watching.

PixelJunk Eden is also the second game to make use of the PlayStation 3’s new Trophy System. As you perform specific tasks in the game, such as activating all the seeds in a garden, an on-screen message will appear letting you know you’ve been awarded a special trophy which will be on-display for others to see online, along with your high scores from the game. The trophies unlock fairly quietly, which I think is a shame, as a little fanfare would make getting them a little more exciting.

Most of the trophies are fairly plain, there’s one for opening the seeds of each garden, another for finishing the game, but there is a creative one for playing the game in multiplayer mode, where you and up to two others can join in hopping and swinging around for Spectras. If you can form a trapeze act where one of you jumps from one player to the other in mid-swing, you’ll get a trophy that few players will have unlocked.

PixelJunk Eden isn’t as easy a game to enjoy as the previous title in the series, PixelJunk Monsters, a more conventional strategy-based game, but it is artistic and experimental enough to reward gamers driven by strange curiosity. You only have to look at the game to know if you fall into that category.