Price: $9.99 | Release Date: July 31, 2008 | ESRB Rating: Everyone (E)

3 stars - Passable, a decent game (rent before buying)

Ok, so you've read our preview on PixelJunk Shooter, and you see some other games on the PSN Store with the word PixelJunk on it, and you wonder what those games are, and if they are any good. Well look no further than this page right here because today we are reviewing PixelJunk Eden.

The gameplay of Eden is simple, you control your character (called a "grimp") through various stages ("gardens"), and jump from plant to plant in an effort to collect a number of "spectra". What this entails is the destruction of the game's enemies ("pollen prowlers") and the collection of the subsequent explosion of "pollen". It's all very hard to describe, hence the large amount of inverted commas used.

I guess at it's heart, you control a character who has to destroy enemies by jumping into them and collecting the subsequent destroyed enemy parts, in order to open up new areas of the stage, and get closer towards the ultimate goal of collecting the part and finishing the stage.

Eden's main attraction does not lie in the gameplay, however. Sure you will be jumping all over the place, swinging on threads attached to plants and bouncing off rocks, but Eden is more about creating a certain ambiance. Each of the gardens (there are 10 in total, and another five in the add-on) has a certain look and feel to it, from different plant types to different backgrounds and enemies. It was really impressive how they managed to take essentially the same gameplay mechanics and style, and infuse them with enough originality to last ten different stages.

The music is also a relatively big part of the game, and features an original minimal house/techno score by a composer named Baiyon. Well, he actually created the backgrounds for the game as well, now that I do a little research. So its clear there is a unifiying theme to the whole game.

Eden is far from a perfect game, however. Each garden must be visited five different times to progress, each visit opening further exploration and another spectra to collect. And each time you have to start from the start, so there is quite a lot of "more of the same" involved in this title. This wouldn't be a bad thing necessarily, but some of the stages are really complex and require a lot more effort than is necessary.

At the end of the day, it's hard to know what to think of Eden. On the one hand, it feels like a relaxation game, where you can just space out and play a nice, easy, fun game. On the other hand, there is a constant pressure in the form of a timer that forces you to keep pushing, destroying the relaxation. It can't quite seem to make its mind up, and this I feel is the biggest weak point.

That being said, I still enjoyed PixelJunk Eden, and don't regret at all dropping the money for it. However, my recommendation to you all is to first download the demo and see for yourself if it seems like something you would enjoy. In other words: