Eden Genesis review

Aeternum Game Studios have been putting out some pretty decent 2D action games recently. The Metroidvania, Aeterna Noctis, and roguelike Summum Aeterna are both solid, challenging titles that don’t always stick the landing but which present new ideas and exciting gameplay alongside gorgeous, colourful environments. Their latest offering, Eden Genesis, follows this same design template, this time in the form of a series of hardcore time challenges.

Think “2D Ghostrunner” and you’re somewhere close to it. The game takes place in 2072, in a cyberpunk dystopia where most of the population is given cybernetic implants called “Neural Amplifier Links” to enhance the body and mind. A major side effect of this is a condition called “Synthetic Neurodegeneration” or SND, a disease that causes the mind to completely unravel via intense migraines.

Main character Leah Anderson is a fairly stock Badass Female Protagonist. She’s got a bad attitude, swears constantly, dresses predominantly in leather straps and cloth wraps of various widths, and possibly has a military background. In order to save herself and her friend, she signs up for an experimental program looking for a cure for SND by overcoming mental challenges and locking off sections of the mind.

Conveniently for us, this takes place in a Matrix-like dimension inside Leah’s mind, and requires her to complete movement and combat challenges in a variety of locations based on the cyberpunk city of Eden. Each door holds a challenge that grades your efforts from D to S+, with the top three grades unlocking special memory cores that will allow access to other areas.

Within each challenge is a series of objectives, though they rarely change much beyond archetype. Movement challenges simply require you to complete the course in the fastest time, while combat challenges will require you to wipe out enemies quickly while sustaining as little damage as possible.

Leah is armed with a “pulse-sword” and a ranged laser weapon called the “Debugger”, which must be charged and can be used sparingly. Throughout each stage are spinning cubes of SND, which you must destroy by running through them. This increases Leah’s “Synchro” level, and maintaining this is key to achieving the highest grade.

To facilitate this, Leah is pretty nimble. You have a dash that can propel you into a sprint, the ability to slide down steep inclines, a triple jump, and a wall-run that works on ceilings too – as long as you hold your momentum. Hitting an enemy in midair will restore one of your jumps, while ground-slamming into glowing sections on ramps will catapult Leah forward at insane speeds, allowing for massive jumps.

While it sounds straightforward, in motion Eden Genesis is anything but. Like Ghostrunner, the emphasis is on getting to grips with all of Leah’s abilities and learning to chain them with precise timing and positioning, which is incredibly hard to do at speed. You can restart any room by holding LB on a controller, which you’ll often do when you miss a jump and have already killed the enemy that would have given you an extra boost, or you realise you’re falling behind the target time. You can follow a ghost of yourself on any stages you’ve already completed, or even download the ghosts of other players.

My biggest issue with Eden Genesis is how fast you’re expected to pack all this information in. Powers aren’t earned gradually; instead, Leah has them all handed to her at the start, so there’s no steady increase in moves and abilities. You have to learn to use them all together in challenges that often require you to hit at least an S-Rank in order to earn enough currency to move to the next area.

As a result, the learning curve feels steep and punishing. There’s a certain amount of payoff when you nail a room perfectly, but this is likely to be a rare occurrence for most people as perfecting a run takes a lot of effort, memory, and precision. Thankfully, most challenges are short and all are repeatable, so the onus is on retrying and perfecting each one.

Outside the challenges themselves is Eden, a sprawling city filled with the usual genre conventions: neon lights, glitzy fast-food vendors, and loitering civilians. It’s also packed to the gills with references to other IPs, from Sea of Stars and The Matrix to Akira (particularly the motorcycle you can unlock which facilitates fast travel between districts).

It’s also a beautiful game. Leah is animated with heaps of personality, the environments are gorgeous if not overly original, and the level design is, crucially, millimetre perfect. The soundtrack is superb, too. It may be fairly standard for the genre, but every track hits the target. However, Leah herself began to grate on me fairly quickly, spitting inane witticisms at everything and responding to pretty much any stimulus with either disinterested sarcasm or unfounded venom.

I also found that I just couldn’t play Eden Genesis for long periods. There’s a samey-ness to the mechanics that isn’t diluted much by the variety of the actual levels, and I found a lot of the difficulty too frustrating to get fully onboard with. After a while I realised I was pushing myself to only get the bare minimum grades to keep progressing and rarely wanted to go back and mop up. Though I will say that it’s the perfect game for the Steam Deck, running buttery smooth on my standard unit.

Eden Genesis is a game for the hardcore gamer. Like Ghostrunner, it requires a total mastery of its systems and mechanics to get the most out of it, and while that is rewarding in and of itself, I just didn’t really care enough about Leah or her world to want to keep banging my head against the difficulty wall. Your mileage will certainly vary by skill level and patience, so you may get more from it than I did, but either way, Eden Genesis demands you either bring your A-game or stay at home.