Child of Eden Review (Xbox 360)

A long time ago when I wrote up my “definitive treatise” on how videogames are in fact legitimate artforms, I listed several titles that I thought demonstrated this best. But one name I neglected – perhaps criminally – to mention was Rez. And this is especially egregious when you consider that that paper was largely about the functions of what I dubbed “composite media” – those mediums that combine multiple sensory approaches to interact with their audience – since Rez was a game about synesthesia, about the unity of sensation, about the influence of one sense over the others. It gave you control over not only the tactile aspects of the experience, but also the visual and especially the acoustic ones, in a frankly unprecedented merger of interactive artstyles.

So… basically… my bad.

Live action in a videogame? This is either going to be really bad or really weird.

Child of Eden follows in Rez’s footsteps as its spiritual successor or sequel or prequel (depending on who you talk to). It blends elements of art and music and gameplay to give you a singular experience that is similar to Rez but skews much more toward visual. But assessing exactly what Child of Eden is can be tricky. I mean, you can break it down into standard gameplay genres and say it’s a rail shooter mixed with a rhythm game. Each level couriers you along and you shoot at stuff before it shoots at you; the distinction is that your end-of-level score is contingent less on accuracy and more on timing. Your goal is to align your shots with the beat so that the resultant notes supplement the background music, which in turn nets you more points, which in turn makes you a better person.

But that’s just what Child of Eden does, that says nothing about what it is. And what Child of Eden is… is… well… complicated.

Let’s start with the setup. The story of the game begins in the future, where humanity has escaped the confines of Earth and begun its trek to the stars. The first child born off-world, Lumi, is homesick for the planet she has never seen and she sings about everything she feels in her heart her true home is like. Skip ahead two hundred years. Humanity has now completely abandoned its home world, but everything about it – all the history and dates and details – is stored on the internet. But these are just facts, numbers, pure, simple, unemotional, objective things; Earth has become nothing more than a database entry, a catalogue of information with all the passion of a dictionary.

Realizing this, scientists use the archived information about Lumi to recreate her personality online and thus infuse their laundry of facts with all her thoughts and sensations, all her desire for Earth. This changes that digital world, merging the objective memory with subjective ones, and creating an emotional space where there was none before. But of course there are always corruptions – viruses, bad bits of data – that taint such endeavors; and your goal is to eliminate them, prevent them from damaging the core of this data and preserve Lumi herself.

So much better than the movie franchise of the same name.

So it’s actually a pretty familiar game setup when you think about it. You got the sci-fi framework (because videogames loves the sci-fi), an excuse to shoot lots and lots of nasty looking critters and you even have to save the princess. But this too doesn’t capture the essence of what Child of Eden is because while these things are correct, they’re not… let’s say… precise.

First, the sci-fi setup is flimsy and unimportant, contained almost exclusively in text blurbs at the front of the opening so inconsequential that when you replay the opening in the extras menu, it skips right past them. The important element of Child of Eden is the sensory experience of the levels themselves that reflect and speak more to contemporary Earth (of which more anon), not some blips about space age futures.

The shooting too has a twist in that you don’t actually kill anything, you convert enemies into benign parts of the environment, you turn the bad bits of data into good bits of data. Much like Flower, Child of Eden is a rare example of a videogame not having you destroy everything you see, but revitalize it.

And as for Lumi, she’s no princess. Or at least she’s not the point. Rather her perspective, her optimistic and uplifting attitude, her grace in the face of ugliness – these are the aspects that need to be preserved. It’s that hope that she represents that you help restore to the world. It’s her vision you’re helping to create.

And it’s that vision, that subjective memory, that you explore in the game. Each level chronicles a piece of your reaching Earth and of the development of the planet itself. You move through the completely digital matrix to first uncover the planet and Lumi (essentially you Google “Lumi Project”) and then move through the world’s evolution – through the basic molecular level of life to aquatic areas populated by marine creatures, which eventually escape the seas (as humans would later escape the planet) and take over the ground and the skies. Next you progress through the beauty of the natural world – now formed – and through the interactions of plant and animal life.

Then comes the human phase. You begin the level in a cosmic and empty void, where you essentially fertilize a stellar egg and give birth to reality, a reality restructured by industrialization (even your health bar now resembles a series of gears) and showcasing slides of achievements in transportation and communications. You follow two beings as they race through the ages, race from conception through history and then back to the void whence they came. That level charts the course of human existence simultaneously in microcosm and macrocosm, at the level of the individual and of society. You follow two competing humans from birth to death while guiding human civilization from the primordial ooze to their greatest peaks to their current moment where they desperately return to their past to reclaim whatever it is they lost.

Well... primordial deep blue sea.

And finally, you too make that journey. Like the whales and fish before you, you escape your boundaries and tame a new land. And then you turn inward, back into the matrix to find the zeal and purpose that was lacking.