Eden Genesis

I came into Eden Genesis expecting something closer to Ghostrunner's first-person knife-through-butter feel, and what I got was messier, more divisive, and honestly more interesting than that. Aeternum Game Studios - the Spanish outfit behind Aeterna Noctis - pivots hard away from Metroidvania structure into something that plays like an arcade time-trial machine wearing a cyberpunk jacket. The setup is Leah Anderson, a hacker with Synthetic Neurodegeneration (SND), getting her consciousness dropped into a virtual city called Eden to run trials that purge the disease. It's a neat excuse to build a level-select structure without apologising for it. The movement toolkit is where this lives or dies. Leah gets double jumps, air dashes, wall-running, ceiling-running, and a laser sword slash that resets your aerial charges when it connects with an enemy - a mechanic that immediately reminded me of cloudstepping from The Messenger. When you're chaining all of it at speed, the game feels genuinely exhilarating, the kind of flow state where you stop reading the geometry and just react to it. The grade system pushes you hard: you need at least an A rank on trials to earn the memory nodes that unlock new city districts, and S and S+ are gated behind speed, full collectible pickups, and a clean no-damage run simultaneously. That's a tight ask, and the online leaderboards with downloadable player ghosts give the whole thing a racing-game energy that works well for the obsessive type. Here's where my patience frayed, though. About a quarter of the levels flip into pure combat arenas - small 2D rooms where you clear waves of enemies as fast and cleanly as possible. The problem is that these enemies are spongy. The time-to-kill goes from zero to unacceptably slow, and the weapon options feel thin: a limited-use Debugger ranged tool and the Bifocal Pulse Sword, with no real dodge mechanic to deal with AOE attacks that chip your score. The flow state evaporates completely in these sections, and the three-second reset timer on combat stages is a small but genuinely irritating friction point. There's also a notable design quirk where Leah receives her full moveset from the start rather than earning abilities progressively, which flattens the learning curve and means the first few hours throw a lot at you without much breathing room. On the technical side, performance is clean. No frame drops in the wall-running sequences I tested, fast load times, and the visual clarity during high-speed runs is handled well - contrasting colours read fast enough that you're not dying to unreadable geometry. Controller is the right call here; keyboard control of Leah's momentum felt imprecise, especially for the slope-stomp speed boost mechanic that serious leaderboard runs depend on. The soundtrack is a proper highlight: pulse-pounding techno in the trial levels, moodier piano in the hub. The voice acting is inconsistent - some characters land, others grate, and Leah's constant sarcasm wears thin faster than the difficulty does. The replay hooks are real. Mirror mode, secret levels gated behind S+ performance, and the ghost leaderboards give committed players a long tail after the main story wraps. The story itself is serviceable cyberpunk with philosophical overtones and a wall of pop culture references that reviewers have split on - some find it charming, others find it overwhelming to the point of undermining the stakes. It doesn't land as hard as it wants to. But if you are here for the platforming, and specifically for the obsessive pull of trimming your run time on a level you've already cleared a dozen times, Eden Genesis delivers that particular itch with real conviction.

Fred · Scout Team

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