Child of Eden
Description
Child of Eden is a rhythmic, visually expressive shooter from Q? Entertainment and essentially a spiritual successor to Q? Entertainment's classic shooter title Rez.
Story
Like Rez, Child of Eden concerns a hero (the player) venturing into a virtual reality, or technological inner-space, in order to combat technological baddies therein. Here, the story concerns a woman called Lumi, who on the notable date of September 11th, 2019, became the first person born in space on the International Space Station. After her death, all her memories and that which defined her was recorded and archived. Two hundred years later, the collected memories, and essence so to speak, are recreated within the confines of Eden--which is the name by which the internet is known in the future. And herein lies all the collected knowledge of human history.
Lumi and Eden, however, are threatened by "viruses" and entities within Eden, and this is where the player comes in--for it is the player's job to venture into this world to save both Lumi and Eden as a whole.
Gameplay
Again, this is where players familiar with Q? Entertainment's seminal Rez will find a lot of familiar territory. The game "flies" through rails-style stages targeting and shooting all manner of wildly imaginative and colorful foes. The main difference, however, is that Child of Eden has been built from the ground-up to take advantage of the power in modern systems, and is especially well-tuned for motion control. For instance, on Kinect, players target foes simply by swiping over them with a reticule controlled by their right hand, and launching attacks by thrusting that hand towards the screen. The left hand controls a purple homing laser used to defend against enemy attacks, and raising both hands launches the powerful "Euphoria," which is a massive screen-filling attack.
The game features five stages, leaderboards, and loads of unlockables such as visual and sound filters to affect and mix up the gameplay. There are also unlockable art and video galleries, and other items to ramp up the replay value for players. Stages also measure Purification rates (percentage of enemies cleared), and star-based ratings for each stage. Each playthrough of a stage is ranked from one to five stars, and collected stars are used to unlock the stages.
Spellings
- チャイルド オブ エデン - Japanese spelling
Groups +
Promos
Credits (Xbox 360 version)
225 People (206 developers, 19 thanks) · View all
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Lead Concept Artist | |
Interface Designer | |
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Synaesthesia Artist | |
Adviser for Synaesthesia | |
Game Design Director | |
Passion Game Designer | |
Evolution Game Designer | |
Beauty and Lumi's Garden Game Designer | |
Programming Director | |
Main Game Programmer | |
Enemy Programmer | |
Kinect Programmer | |
Graphic Programmer | |
TCR & System Programmer | |
System & Tools Programmer | |
Sound Programmer | |
[ full credits ] |
Reviews
Critics
Average score: 81% (based on 31 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 11 ratings with 1 reviews)
Sensory overload would be an appropriate description
The Good
I can't say that I am familiar with Tetsuya Mizuguchi's other work, but just going by Child of Eden, the man and his team clearly have talent for making things look nice, complimenting the synth soundtrack nicely. Everything's clear, there's plenty of colour and the actual designs present are quite inventive.
The mechanics of the game are fine, as well. Aiming is as smooth as it needs to be without becoming slippery and the alternate weapons offer a balance that does work.
The Bad
As clean as it is, Child of Eden is a very visually busy game. Things fly across the screen either very quickly or in large groups so you can't hit them all at once, making it difficult to keep track of what you're looking at. On more than one occasion, one can expect to be firing at a large enemy in the distance and get hit by a little tiny purple guy you weren't looking at because you thought you'd got them all a few seconds ago.
Another gripe is the insistence that the player must collect a number of performance stars before they're allowed into the next level, forcing them to go through the same motions quite a lot.
The Bottom Line
Mizuguchi evidently has things to say about the impact of technology, but whatever that is, it's lost somewhere underneath an aesthetically pleasing and well enough designed but overbearing game that throws more than it needs to at the player.
PlayStation 3 · by CrankyStorming (2927) · 2012
Trivia
Theme Music
Child of Eden's main theme, "Heavenly Star", has also been featured in the games Lumines II and No More Heroes.
Awards
- 4Players
- 2011 – Best Art Design of the Year
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Related Sites +
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Wikipedia: Child of Eden
article in the open encyclopedia about the game (English)
Identifiers +
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by ResidentHazard.
PlayStation 3 added by Sciere.
Additional contributors: Sciere, Patrick Bregger, Harmony♡, Zhuzha.
Game added June 20, 2011. Last modified March 14, 2023.