They previously provided the soundtrack to his 2004 sonic puzzler, Lumines and they're here again, conjuring the game's audio landscape of tinkling ambient techno J-pop. Lumi, the character at the game's heart, is also the "virtual idol" who fronts Genki Rockets, a dance music collective produced by Mizuguchi. You don't have to be a veteran of the second summer of love to get what imagery he's playing with here.Īlthough it'll probably help because the Eden concept expands beyond the game itself. Mizuguchi is looking for an immersive ride that in some way resembles the clubbing experience – there's even a screen-clearing smart bomb called "euphoria", accessed by throwing your arms in the air.
Suddenly, you're reading the game's rhythm, painting the screen with laser fire and clapping to swap between weapons (you can also operate one weapon with your right hand and one with your left, though this takes a little more practise). There's also a deep scoring system with multipliers available to players who can target eight enemies before blasting them, and colour coded gates between sequences that players unlock with timed blasts.Īfter a few minutes of floundering things begin to click into place. Control over the targeting system is intuitive and accurate, and lag is minimal so the natural interface between player and machine – the vital link in the sensory chain imagined by Mizuguchi – is supple and compelling. As you kill (or "purify" to use the game's hippy parlance), you compose.īut the really important thing about the game, is that there is solid shoot-'em-up design beneath the dazzling aesthetics. When these organic oddities are hit, the gentle, echoing pings and bleeps they make differ depending on the weapon you've employed. There are groups of pods forming floating caterpillars there are erupting insect cocoons, swooping jellyfish and fluttering crystalline butterflies. Amid soaring cloudscapes and glittering starry skies, the screen fills with flower-like beings that pulsate and transmute as they are targeted. The "tracer" auto-fires light missiles at onscreen enemies, while the lock-on option highlights up to eight objects, which can then be dispatched by thrusting your palm forwards (or, if you're feeling energetic, by kicking).īut of course, the wonder of the game is that you are not blasting angular spacecraft out of the dead vacuum of space. You interact with the world via a reticule controlled with your right hand and two different "weapons".
Unfortunately, the data is now being attacked by a virus, and the player's role is to go into each of the five sectors of the Lumi program and purify it of invading code. Lumi, the first child to be born aboard a distance space station, has died, but in order to preserve her being, the infant's personality has been uploaded onto a powerful computer named Eden. The concept at the heart of it all is the stuff of … well I don't know, but lets go with techno-spiritualist mythology. He's a techno-hippy, he has these messages he wants to get across – love, happiness … things that would cause an allergic reaction in some masculine gamers. Speaking about the charismatic head of his studio, James Mielke, the producer of Child of Eden, explains: "This is the culmination of his life's work.
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