PixelJunk™ Eden

Beautiful awesome audio/visual game

Used to play this game on the PS3 when i was a kid, just as good as i remember it being when i was younger. Now i can really appreciate the soundtrack, visuals, and difficulty of it!

If the idea of Super Mario Galaxy meets Bionic Commando tickles your fancy, PixelJunk Eden is a great little game to play. The art direction, mechanics, and sandbox level designs are intriguing, relatively easy to understand, yet unique and go in wild directions. It all feels appropriate for its time, yet also timeless in how well all of these aspects have aged. This could have dropped in 2024 and for the most part, I think it would be just as well received. Which is not to say there aren't some flaws with this one. For starters, navigation as you get deeper into this game is a little confusing and not the most clear in how exactly you get to the other worlds. If the sandbox world of No More Heroes was criticized for being bloated and boring, this game's sandbox for just simply selecting a level has a similar level of friction with far less communication to the player on how to get to these level select icons, so it really just feels like a hassle by the end to get in a game if you really just wanted to pop in-and-out for some quick levels. And then one major gripe I have is that I couldn't get the button prompts to display controller glyphs, and was stuck trying to figure out what all the keyboard prompts were supposed to be on Steam Deck. Eventually muscle memory allowed this issue to be mitigated, but it's extremely annoying and a basic function that should have been there from day one. This review might come off a bit negative, but I don't think these issues take away what is a really excellent, fun, and creative platformer, where fans of inde platformers looking for fun and innovative mechanics should really give PixelJunk Eden a shot. And aside from the glyphs complaint, this game works perfectly on a Steam Deck and was absolutely my preferred platform to play this game on. And a side note, this is a part of a much larger series of (unrelated) PixelJunk games so don't worry about missing anything by playing this one but not the others.