Originally released back in 2008 on the PlayStation 3, PixelJunk Eden was developed by Japan-based studio Q-Games and has the player jumping, climbing and swinging through the game’s levels, or gardens, collecting items to grow the plants in the gardens and to unlock even more gardens to grow.
PixelJunk Eden’s zen experience of collection and growth is accentuated its techno soundtrack but it is the ‘synchronization meter’ that throws this experience out a little and I would like to talk a little more on this feeling of mechanical dissonance.
First things first though, a little bit more on the game and its mechanics because I find Eden a little hard to throw into a generic game category. The mechanics themselves are quite simple but polished to a point where they feel responsive and are easy to quickly come to grasp with.
The player traverses the world by jumping from plant to plant or by swinging on a thread of silk. There is a little bit more to the movement, like the slam and teleport but the player can move just fine with these two options. The jump, shown in the gif above when held will have the player attempt to move towards the mouse cursor and will fall through any of the world's geometry, releasing the key will have the player stick to most surfaces in the game.
Then there is the thread which when deployed will not only let the player swing around a central point but will blink and leave a residual image when the strand reaches the direction of the next ‘spectra’, the games main collectable similar to Mario’s stars. Combining these two mechanics allows the player to quickly orient themselves without the need of a minimap or an increased number of inputs, which allows them to focus on the games main goal of collecting.
But ‘spectra’ are not your only collectable in Eden there is also what the game refers to as pollen. Collecting the pollen will activate coloured blobs in the world, seeds, which will grow when the player runs into them.
So glide through the world, collect objects that allow you to glide to different parts of the world to collect more objects, a nice little game loop. But what about this dissonance you speak of?
This is where the synchronization meter comes in and adds an element of time pressure to an otherwise calming game. If the player does not collect ‘crystals’ before the meter in the bottom left of the screen before it runs out they are ejected from the level with all of their progress being lost. This pulls the player right out of their swing, jump, glide, bounce routine and into oh no, where is this every specific object in the specific part of the level that I am currently in?
This change in tone feels out of place and because the player has their focus on moving to ever greater heights it feels like it just comes out of the blue or could even remove the zen aspect of the game making the player laser focused on a specific rarer collectable, where the other collectable, the pollen, is freely scattered over the gardens.
