Child Of Eden
Child of Eden is supposedly the spiritual successor to Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s cult sensation Rez. I say supposedly because I never played Rez. And had it not been for the ‘works best with Kinect’ moniker I probably would never have played Child of Eden.
Adding the Kinect functionality and the game starts to make sense, in a hard to describe way. If you’ve ever sat watching the iTunes visuliser and thought to yourself that it would be trippy to watch it whilst doing drugs, then you’re half way to understanding Child of Eden.
Once you get past a nonsensical introduction video that goes on about the fate of the internet and a sexy young woman – or something like that – you’ll be plunged into a world of music, colours, shapes and movement, all controlled by moving your arms.
Basically you have to help clean up the infected parts of the internet so that we can all have a happy future. There are various things you will need to do, all whilst tripping out to some very psychedelic imagery that will give you flash backs to when you used LSD in college. You have a couple of different ways to destroy these nasty bugs before they destroy you – which will happen often if you’re not on the ball – and that is with a type of lock on gun where you just have to hover the reticle over the target, the other is a quick shot that involve waving your spare arm to fire. The third is a destroy everything bomb that you have to raise both arms in the air in a kind of I give up gesture.
It really is that simple to play, but at the same time frustratingly hard. Whilst you get used to the controls and such, you’ll be repeating the same part of the first level over and over again, wishing there was a manual save function. But this could be said of any game that decided to embrace an original approach to gaming.
To put it bluntly, Child of Eden is an original, trippy game that everyone with a Kinect unit should experience. You’ll easily find yourself immersed in the experience as will anyone watching you.