PixelJunk Eden 2 review: a stylish sequel to an indie classic

PixelJunk Eden was ahead of its time. The idea of a download-only indie game with pretentious, abstract 2D nontextual matter and a pulsing techno soundtrack doesn't unbroken remotely unusual in 2020, but there really wasn't much like Nirvana when it born happening the PS3 in 2008. Developed away Kyoto's Q-Games, with music and visuals from topical anaestheti-creative person-inside-out-creative-director Baiyon, Eden was a hypnotic triumph, if a little more challenging than its chill vibration mightiness have led you to require.

Now we have a sequel, PixelJunk Eden 2, which is coming out today as a Nintendo Flip exclusive. Much of the content and music is repurposed from a 2018 mobile game, Paradise Obscura. If it's new to you, though, Shangri-la 2 will feel like a true sequel — and one that can be friendlier to play than the original.

The basic premise is identical. Every stage is set in a garden, and your goal is to help your tiny character reach a radiance "spectra" somewhere on the correspondenc. You do this by growing the plants in the garden. Concoct it as a platformer where there aren't many platforms until you readiness them down yourself. There are seeds placed throughout the level, and you fill them dormy by swinging on a ribbon to collect floating pollen spores nigh. Once a seed is full, you can bounce operating theater swing into it and causa branches to sprout out, which will help you get to more seeds, spores, and, at long las, the spectra.

If this sounds orphic, IT's a lot simpler in practice. The entire back is played with a single analog stick and a jump button, and really altogether you have to master is the physics of vacillation around.

Eden 2 is also a lot more exonerative than its predecessor, which had a brutal prison term limit and would frequently send you plummeting all the path to the bottom of the garden if you uncomprehensible a jump. Some of the shipway that Eden Obscura adapted its controls to equal more forgiving on touchscreens give made their mode support to Eden 2's longstanding port; you can levitate in lay out, e.g., and leap sixfold times before landing. Heaven 2 also brings you back to your jumping-off point if you crepuscle too far, and there are checkpoints around the map that readjust the metre limit — though, really, I think the back would be amended off losing the time limit altogether.

The visuals and music are acquainted with but atomic number 102 less mesmeric. Baiyon's soundtrack has a more wholesome feel than that of the groundbreaking, which was identical untold of its sentence; its sparse minimal techno could've been upraised even from a mid-2000s Kompakt digest. (I say that in a bang-up way: Shangri-la was a post-club staple of mine for years.) This is even by all odds a game you should be playing with headphones surgery at loud volume.

Eden 2's structure is a little curious. It serves you leading a selection of levels, each of which you have to finish once to make up presented with another put across. You can't replay some of them at testament, which is in contrast to the archetype pun's map screen that allow you jump directly into each stage. I like the dislodge to simpler menus, but I would have preferable to start out with more established progression.

Unmoving, PixelJunk Shangri-la 2 is an easy recommendation. Information technology resurrects an independent classic and makes it much less frustrating to play, which I would call an melioration for something that ought to be perfect for zoning out. Eden 2 isn't quite as novel a prospect atomic number 3 the original was 12 years ago, but it still manages to abide out as uniquely stylish.

PixelJunk Garden of Eden 2 is out today for the Nintendo Flip.