#pixeljunk eden 2

[xx-vro27-xx]

pls look at my pixeljunk eden ocs 😭

[fancypantsrecords]

Baiyon - PixelJunk Eden 2 Original Soundtrack | Self-released | 2022 | Green, Gold & White Swirl + Red, Silver & White Swirl

[nintendocafe]

PixelJunk Eden 2 launches on Nintendo Switch this summer.

PixelJunk Eden 2 from Q-Games: Jump, spin, swing and take out invading creatures to collect pollen and grow gardens back to full bloom. Along the way you’ll encounter a host of creatures and beautifully realized alien worlds to explore and liberate. Wallow in a feeling of synesthesia as the art and exquisite music from Baiyon envelops your mind and soul, and you, your Grimp and the delightful aesthetics of PixelJunk Eden become one. Enjoy this wonderland alone or with a friend via local multiplayer.

[nettosgameroom]

Dreams of Another and PixelJunk Eden 2 Launch October 10th

Dreams of Another and PixelJunk Eden 2 are officially launching on October 10th, 2025; games can be purchased separately or in a bundle on P

[miloscat]

[Review] Eden Obscura (iOS) & Pixeljunk Eden 2 (NS)

A messy mobile malaise.

I ended my review of the original Pixeljunk Eden hopeful that a sequel would smooth out some rough edges and iterate in interesting ways on an already experimental game. Instead what I got was a clumsy spinoff, an aesthetic rehash that pivoted into mobile game exploitation and shallow repetition.

Eden Obscura is the smart device iteration of this follow-up project, released ten years after the original. I’m not sure what Baiyon was doing in the meantime but many of the assets are recycled, from the minimalist interactables to the dreamy backgrounds and even the ambient techno soundtrack. The basics are the same: swinging on silk, bursting baddies, procuring pollen, sprouting seeds, and making your merry way to a magical MacGuffin. Only now your time limit is tiny, you have multiple mid-air directional jumps by swiping or you can hover in place, and you’re always being penalised for straying too far. The new “out of bounds” system locks in a play area from where you last jumped, and far too often you’ll accidentally fly or fall out.

As a mobile experience turning these large playing fields into bite-sized sessions makes sense, but they also turned something that leaned more towards chill puzzling and exploration into a frantic flick-a-thon. Sadly other mobile conventions crept in too: microtransactions, a lootbox system that awards one-time boosts. Worst of all is the “random content” dynamic, where you’re assigned a draw of levels and a playable character rather than allowing you a preference or any means of guiding your own experience.

The little critters you play as—Grimps, as they’re called—each have their own gameplay modifier. This can be extending the timer when seeds are grown, boosting the speed of your jumps, or shortening your silk (why?). The original game had a few designs for P1/2/3, but they’ve added a bunch more here, many of them musos and DJs owing to Baiyon’s vocation (and I’ll note that from what I saw they’re overwhelmingly male). When you clear a set of levels and the lottery picks your next Grimp, you’re stuck with them until you beat the next set. It makes the game feel a right grind, repeating the same things and watching some bars go up, and I felt sad that it had come to this.

A side note that the “Obscura” in the name is a reference to cameras, and indeed your device’s camera will be constantly on while the app is running (not great for battery life). This is used to affect the backgrounds, as everything visible through the lens will be projected in-game in highly distorted fashion, as well as enabling some cheap gimmicks during gameplay like occasionally pointing at light surfaces for bonus time, or pointing it at specific colours between levels to eke out more boosts (with a cooldown timer, naturally). All in all it felt unnecessary.

So, I didn’t spend too long on Eden Obscura, keen to drop it and move on to the proper console sequel released two years later on the Switch. Little did I know that this now numbered sequel is little more than a port of the mobile game(!), now sans camera functionality. It’s a fully paid-up eShop game, but still has the one-time boosts and the loathed lottery system. At least the screen space is bigger and the timers more generous, but movement has for some reason been restricted: instead of half a dozen mid-air swipes and holds to build up your combo, you can now do one (1) extra directional jump after performing one aerial pause. And even though control is back to a controller, the controls themselves are completely different to the original game’s controls, and it just feels like you have less, well, control.

With only a drip feed of new content and a grating system of randomly enforced levels and characters, I got fed up pretty quickly with both implementations of this so-called sequel. I gave the mobile version a decent chance in some casual play sessions, but putting that experience on a console shows up its annoyances even more starkly and I didn’t play the Switch version for more than an hour. I’m done here. An ignoble end to my series on grappling games, and an object lesson that sometimes a sequel should be left at the back of the ideas drawer. If you have any interest at all in these games, please go check out the PC port of the original instead, which I’ve heard has a quality of life feature to save you from falls.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

So like a decade ago, or I guess a bit more by this point, a bunch of indie games came out under the PixelJunk branding, and they got a decent amount of attention for what they were. They were generally all well made and tried a bunch of different things, so they were pretty well received. I'm pretty sure I only tried three of them and didn't really get along with two, but I really liked PixelJunk Eden way back whenever that was. Much to my surprise they made a sequel like 10+ years later.

The basic idea of both Eden and Eden 2 is the logical conclusion of what if platformer but no run, only jump? You can swing in a circle around whatever object you've landed on, launch yourself in whatever direction you want, land on something else, and repeat. Very simple, very few buttons, but they did it well enough that it's pretty satisfying the whole way through the game.

The main selling points are probably the art and music and overall vibe those create, and it's generally pretty chill if you're into the style of both of those things.

All those things are the same in 2, just like in the first one, but most of the things they changed make it less fun for me.

The biggest one is probably that there's only one goal/thing to collect on each level and no meaningful incentive to do anything else other than go directly to it, ignoring everything else. In the original you had to do several things to finish each level, and it did at least minorly reward you for doing optional stuff, but in 2 I felt like I was spending very little time in each level and only doing the bare minimum to progress.

The other major change is the "spice" system, where it gives you random powerups you can choose to use before starting a level. You get them by collecting enough of various things as you play through levels, and it could've been a fun way to change things around, but...it wasn't, at least for me. As soon as I realized they were consumable and not just things I'd permanently unlocked and could swap in and out I stopped bothering using them because they always felt like they either didn't do enough useful to be worth using or were so useful that I didn't want to waste them. Also it's so easy to finish everything without using them that that didn't really convince me to either.

When those are your main motivation to do anything optional in levels and there's very little non-optional they end up going by really quickly, mostly before I felt like I had to get used to the one I was on, and it kinda ruins the vibe a bit. A mode more like the original game unlocks after you've unlocked literally everything else in the game, but by that point I didn't really feel like doing any more beyond what I already had.

I did still have enough fun to get to that point though, and it's the kind of thing that works well in little bits and pieces here and there over a while, which is what I did with it in between doing other things. I feel like I'm making it sound worse than it really is, but mostly it just bugged me the whole time that it was pretty good but could've been better with a few relatively minor changes.

[ch3ukl1]

PixelJunk Eden 2 Collector's Edition

[operationrainfall]

Nintendo Download for 12/10/2020

Nintendo Download for 12/10/2020

We’re back for the second Nintendo Download of December 2020. This one is a shorter one, with three featured titles and a somewhat shorter selection of new eShop games. We also have one major sale to look at, which is in celebration of The Game Awards.   Featured Games First up we have DOOM Eternal ($59.99). The game is a direct sequel to DOOM 2016. Take on the armies of hell that are invading…

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