If you have a PS3, you should really download and play this.
Here's the E3 trailer. I think Pyro was saying something about it when he was here, but I didn't know what it was. The only stuff I knew about with the PixelJunk name was their racing game and their popular
Monsters game, inspired by
Tower Defense. I've never been big on the latter, so I never looked into it, and the first just never really caught my interest.
Anyway, I saw more on
Eden and was very intrigued, so I bought and downloaded it, and I've been having an absolute blast with it. It's right along the same lines as
Rez,
Everyday Shooter,
flOw,
Synasthete, and
Lumines just in terms of the kind of audiovisual niche it falls into, though the games are nothing alike. It makes me think more of
Wik and the Fable of Souls if you're at all into indy gaming, though it's quite different from that in a lot of respects too.
The basic premise is that you're a little thing called a "grimp", and you've got to complete the various "garden" stages in the game by collecting these spore-like things which will grow plants on your home garden, the game's basic hub. But to do this you also have to grow plants, which you do by popping the game's enemies (the most basic of which are just floating targets and can't hurt you). When you pop them, they release clouds of pollen, and you can collect the pollen to charge seeds -- hotspots on the map -- which will then grow plants that stretch up and around the level, allowing you to climb around and get up to places you couldn't before. The aforementioned comparison to
Wik is that you can also shoot out lines of silk and use them to twirl yourself around on the plants, collecting crystals which increase your time/health gauge, popping baddies, and collecting pollen. You've also got rock formations in the game which can't be twirled on with silk, and are harder to navigate, but which you can still cling to.
It's very fun and they've really got a cohesive audiovisual package going on with it. The music isn't necessarily the most spectacular stuff you ever heard, but it fits really perfectly with the game. I guess they outsourced the music to some Japanese guy, but I forget the name. I hadn't heard of him, at any rate. Still, it's good stuff, and gives the game a trancey, relaxed, sometimes slightly melancholy tone that really works nicely with the vibrant visuals, which range from rich and dark to bright and colorful.
Oh, and did I mention it supports up to 3 players for multiplayer? Neato!
So yeah, just wanted to throw some info out there since I hadn't heard anyone mention this yet. I hadn't heard about the game myself until just recently, and it's definitely one of the titles helping to prove that PSN has every bit as much potential as XBLA. It also makes me pretty happy that the PS3 seems to be finding a place for nice little art games in this style, and I hope it'll foster an environment for more of them as things go on.
Note that it's sort of difficult to get a sense of how the levels are built just looking at these screens. Watch the trailer for a better idea. The things get quite vertical and are pretty big. I believe there are 10 stages, each with 5 of the things you need to collect to "win", and each time you get to a new one it boots you out and lets you go through it again (which sounds like punishment, but the game is very zen-like and fun to simply play, so it gives you an excuse to try new routes through the levels and just experiment with the environment).
