Editor’s Note: To read an interview The Creators Project conducted with Tetsuya Mizuguchi, designer of Child of Eden and founder of Q Entertainment, click here.Child of Eden is a Kinect game and I don't own a Kinect for two reasons. First because I don't have enough space to use a Kinect in my apartment, and second because I don't have enough space to put a Kinect on my desk. (I play games by plugging consoles into one of my computer screens.) So why the hell am I reviewing Child of Eden?Well, because I want to, but mostly because it's not just a Kinect game. It's playable with a controller and it's got heritage.In 2001, United Game Artists, under the leadership of Tetsuya Mizuguchi, released a rail shooter for the Dreamcast and PS2 that existed briefly under the codename Project Eden, but was ultimately released as Rez, largely to critical acclaim. They called it a synesthesia game. Synesthesia is a condition where different sensory areas of the brain are cross-linked, leading to sensory overlap—synesthetics can perceive colors as sounds, for example. Rez was a rail-shooter that linked everything to sound—your shots automatically went off in sync with the game's music, and played different sorts of notes depending on your health. It was about venturing into a corrupted computer system to rescue a trapped, partially corrupted artificial intelligence, and while the story was thin, the aesthetics conveyed a theme of growth and evolution—as you progressed you built the game's stages into more and more complex forms. I never played the original Rez, but I did hear a lot about it, and finally played its re-release, Rez HD, on Xbox Live.(Rez was also vaguely famous for being released with the trance vibrator, a peripheral that was just a pad that vibrated in sync with the game's music. You can imagine the uses people put that to.)Tetsuya Mizuguchi would later go on to release Lumines and Every Extend Extra, two more games about synchronizing gameplay, rhythm, and music. All have been met with some considerable acclaim.Bluntly, Child of Eden is Tetsuya Mizuguchi re-imagining Rez. It's another rail-shooter, it's another synesthesia game, and it's once again about venturing into a corrupted computer network to rescue an AI. This time the AI is Lumi, the mascot of Mizuguchi's real-life musical group Genki Rockets, a computer-generated idol singer whose biographical conceit is that she's a real girl who was born on the International Space Station and has never set foot on Earth. It's actually more complicated than that, because the game is set in the 25th century and you're trying to rescue a computer generated reconstruction of the fictional "real" Lumi from far in the game's past (which is our future, Lumi having been born in, I dunno, 2017 or something?)… and I'm going to stop talking about the story now.Anyway. With a controller, Child of Eden plays pretty much like Rez. I love Rez, so I like Child of Eden. If you've got an Xbox 360, go download the Rez HD demo to see how Child of Eden plays. It's a rail shooter, you move your targeting reticule around to lock on enemies, and you get a score multiplier if you lock onto eight enemies before you fire and (unlike Rez) a bigger score multiplier if you fire in sync with the soundtrack's rhythm. Also unlike Rez, there's a second gun that shoots rapid-fire and is used mostly for shooting down incoming projectiles.So. Weird, imaginative, fun…Read about the downsides of the game in the original post over on Viceland.
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