Child of Eden is a rhythmic, visually expressive shooter from Q? Entertainment, essentially a spiritual successor to Q? Entertainment's classic shooter title Rez .
The game concerns a hero (the player) venturing into a virtual reality, or technological inner-space, in order to combat technological baddies therein. The story revolves around a woman called Lumi, who became the first person born in space on the International Space Station on September 11th, 2019. After her death, all her memories and essence were recorded and archived. Two hundred years later, these collected memories are recreated within the confines of Eden, which is the name by which the internet is known in the future. Eden is threatened by "viruses" and entities, and it's up to the player to save both Lumi and Eden.
Players familiar with Q? Entertainment's seminal Rez will find a lot of familiar territory in Child of Eden . The game "flies" through rails-style stages targeting and shooting wildly imaginative and colorful foes. The main difference is that Child of Eden has been built from the ground-up to take advantage of modern systems, especially well-tuned for motion control. On Kinect, players target foes by swiping over them with a reticule controlled by their right hand, launching attacks by thrusting that hand towards the screen. The left hand controls a purple homing laser used to defend against enemy attacks, and raising both hands launches the powerful "Euphoria," which is a massive screen-filling attack.
The game features five stages, leaderboards, and loads of unlockables such as visual and sound filters to affect and mix up the gameplay. There are also unlockable art and video galleries, and other items to ramp up the replay value for players. Stages measure Purification rates (percentage of enemies cleared), and star-based ratings for each stage. Each playthrough of a stage is ranked from one to five stars, and collected stars are used to unlock the stages.