2011 hasn't been a great year for games, but it has been a passable one. And despite the fact that Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Child of Eden doesn't reach the heights established by the game's spiritual predecessor, Rez, and overall is flawed in a few ways, this is the first game of the year that feels like a masterpiece, a real transformative experience.
That doesn't mean that anyone who picks up a controller (or not, but more on that in a bit) will find something to like here. Indeed, if this is the game to kick off a Kinect craze amongst the "hardcore" I'll be completely shocked, as Child of Eden emphasizes elements of game design that, besides its synaesthetic impulses, were fostered almost entirely within the cradle of arcade game development (no surprise, considering Mizuguchi's involvement in games as different from this one as Sega Rally).
None of this is going to come as a surprise to you if you've played Rez. For those of you who haven't (and what is wrong with you also, by the way), here's the rundown – it's basically a first-person, on-rails shooter, but filtered through a surreal, kaleidoscopic lens. Rainbow coloured shapes fly at you and it's your job to shoot them down, all in time to a deconstructed techno soundscape. As much as the game is about arcade conventions, it's also about losing yourself in sensory overload, forcing a zen-like state of entrancement as colours, sounds, and even vibration (at least, with the standard controller) all work in tandem. It's a lot less about the mechanics, specifics and features of the game and more about the euphoria that it engenders in the player.
This was all true of Rez as well, but Child of Eden takes it to new heights. Talking about the specifics of the scoring system, the length of the game (the sticking point for every review I've read of the game, though to me, its length seems absolutely perfect and encourages endless replayability, something that can't be said of, um, most games), or the touchiness of the controls seems like not being able to see the forest for the trees. Child of Eden is far more than the sum of its features – indeed, the moments that best sum up the game would be ones where the player feels completely overwhelmed and in awe, and while that state of being can be tiring (once again, a perfect length for this game), the fact that the game creates something both so jaw-droppingly intense while being so resolutely surreal is kind of amazing.
So the one complaint that can be leveled against Child of Eden is that Rez kind of got here first, and did many of the same things. Child of Eden, despite its innovations, couldn't really hope to compete against something both so similar and so groundbreaking. Nevertheless, Q? Entertainment has done the only thing imaginable here, which is to make the game even more involving than Rez. HD is usually simply a case of higher fidelity rather than more inventive use of enhanced power, but Child of Eden is the best argument for high definition in any medium. Every colour, every shape, every single moment of the game seems to literally pop off the screen. It's also not a bunch of random shit thrown on the screen – every level has a cohesion to its chaos, making Child of Eden one of the most unbelievably gorgeous games ever made, and all playing into the synaesthesia experiment perfectly.
The other element, which I've already alluded to, is Child of Eden's Kinect implementation. I don't have Kinect, so I can't comment specifically on its use, but if it works as well as it's supposed to, then it's a clear and decisive use of a particular control method, something that I can't help but be totally in love with. Indeed, Child of Eden is the first game to understand exactly what Kinect allows a designer to do, which is to totally immerse the player without the need for that unnatural hunk of plastic in their hands. And in terms of the themes of the game – the player-centric themes, not the mostly-inconsequential story themes – Kinect is perfect in this situation. Kinect shouldn't be the reason to play this game, obviously; the overall design of the game should be. But with that being said, Kinect certainly assists in building Child of Eden's synaesthetic credibility.
The only problem with Child of Eden, and it's really only apparent after playing Rez so soon before, is that where Rez was a mostly context-free, polished black diamond of a game, Child of Eden suffers due to some incredibly cheesy choices. The music is at its best when it's obscure and disjointed, but occasionally it ends up sounding too much like this song, which is unfortunate. The game doesn't necessarily need techno music either, but if the game wants to deliver an electronic soundtrack, it needs to be a little less uneven than this one. And even though I complained about there being too much of a kind of stupid story in Rez, it was incredibly easy to ignore. Not so much in Child of Eden. While the setup is kind of interesting (the game seems to be making the point that human memory is a valuable commodity that must be protected at all costs), it's delivered with live action (!) interludes that outpace even the soundtrack in cheesiness. It ends up looking like a J-Pop video instead of the epic quest that it should be, and that too is unfortunate. Rez never needed more context, it needed less, and while Child of Eden is far more opaque than most games being released, it could do with a dialed down approach to storytelling – the visuals do enough storytelling as it is.
But if there's any experience worth having in video games this year, this is the one. Outside of those (small, in the scheme of things) issues I've outlined, this is a masterclass in video game design and this is also one of only a few games that understands exactly what a video game can and should do. Mizuguchi is one of the few auteurs of the video game industry, and to ignore what is his (flawed) masterpiece would be a shame. Play this with Kinect, play this with a controller; play this.