If the previous two PixelJunk titles were Q-Games re-imaginings of games and traditions gone before – Monsters of Desktop Tower Defense, Racers of so many frenzied 8bit top-down racers – PixelJunk Eden marks the developer’s first excursion into the true unknown. Sure, there are faint echoes of games past – an aiming system cribbed from Worms, a Rainbow Islands emphasis on climbing upscreen, and a proto- LocoRoco aesthetic – but the sum of Eden’s parts is a unique and soulful original.

Ten levels, or ‘gardens’, each presented in a flat-tone colour palette with intricate foliage silhouetted in the foreground, frame the game’s overarching collect ’em up challenge. This comes in two tiers: the first requires you to break pollen buds with your character, the Pikmin-esque Grimp, and harvest the hundreds of seeds released to create new shoots, which provide routes to ever-higher altitudes in the garden.

Ascension leads toward the ultimate goal: Spectra, glowing collectable objects which act like Mario’s stars, returning you to the hub screen when found and opening up new gardens as the collection expands. With 50 Spectra to collect, five in each garden, there’s a lot of repetition, and since the game’s core interactions aren’t rich enough to allow the same environments to be explored in varied ways, Eden soon reveals itself to be an experience much wider than it is deep.

Q-Games’ self-proclaimed vision for the PixelJunk brand is ‘high-quality casual gaming’. This focus is evidenced by Eden’s control scheme, which has been so simplified and reduced that it begins to hurt the experience. The left stick moves the Grimp with speed and precision on the horizontal axis, but multi-function mapping to X makes moving up and down screen a frequently frustrating and unintuitive experience.

Actions are often performed through non-inputs: your Grimp will stick to plants automatically; a tap of the button releases his grip in a reversal of standard interactive syntax that takes a very long time to relearn. Likewise, tap the button once while standing on a plant and the Grimp will release a short string of silk that works as a kind of temporary bungee cord allowing you to swing to gain momentum and launch yourself off at angles. But Q’s decision to make the silk deployment an automatic action, with any kind of button input breaking the string, seems counterintuitive even after hours spent with the game.

Added to the awkwardness is an auto-depleting life gauge that acts as a time limit for each excursion. While this gauge can be refilled by collecting crystals, it adds a low-level, niggling pressure that seems at odds with the gentle and leisurely atmosphere the rest of the design generates.

Eden’s precise artistic vision, dreamlike menus and sharply contemporary Japanese ambience is a perfect fit for PSN, but for all its purity this is an Eden too mechanically flawed to match its presentation.

7/10