Due to severe overpopulation, the planet Earth’s diameter is increasing with the growth of towering mega-cities, each inhabited by millions of humans. Buildings are growing ever-upwards, interconnected with a thick web of roads, walkways and service channels. In these giant human hives, only the affluent may feel the rays of the sun and breathe the cleaner air. Your team has been selected to go down and investigate problems at the Real Meat factory, in which all of the equipment has started to simultaneously malfunction. Technicians sent to repair the machinery have gone missing without explanation. The UPA's (Urban Protection Agency) orders are clear: prepare for the descent. Project Eden is a 3D shooter with an emphasis on puzzle-solving. You'll lead a squad consisting of four UPA agents: Carter Dorlan, Andre Herderman, Minoko Molensky, and Amber Torrelson. Each operative has his or her own special ability that you'll need to master in order to progress. As Carter, use your knack for interrogation and nimble fingers to gain information and unlock doors. When you need something fixed and in a hurry, Andre is your man. Computer terminals are no match for Minoko's hacking talents. Last but not least, Amber can traverse hazardous environments with nary a scratch and she'll be your weapons expert. Brave the lowest strata and prepare to go through hell in Project Eden! If you're looking for some gritty cyberpunk-ish storytelling, challenging puzzles, and original gameplay (with optional drop-in, drop-out co-op), this is your game!
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All you need to know about Project EDEN is that it's a 3D action adventure version of Blizzard's The Lost Vikings and Sierra's Gobliiins, set in a dystopian future with a generous helping of John Carpenter body horror.
For those unfamiliar with the games mentioned above, think of a puzzle adventure in which you control multiple characters, each with their particular skills, which must be used in the right context and in synergy with each other in order to progress.
That Project EDEN is something special becomes immediately evident from the CG intro, which establishes the game's universe without need of a single word, through the clever use of a child's teddy bear, which is accidentally dropped from a terrace in a white utopian future city and slowly plummets down and down into increasingly dark and degraded layers of past urban developments and the humanity who lives there in the dark, until it lands at the very bottom, where it's picked up by the hand of what is implied to be a horribly disfigured mutant. It's brilliant averbal storytelling that gives you all the context you need without any kind of exposition dump. From there we follow our team of four police operatives in their descent into the underworld in search of two missing engineers, which quickly spirals into something much more sinister.
The levels are essentially massive puzzle boxes in the vein of Core's own Tomb Raider, except far more complex, since you have to use four people to solve them instead of one. You might have to send your robot through toxic gas to open a door so your engineer can repair a fuse box so the hacker can maneuver a platform around to ferry the team leader across a chasm to open a door and let everyone through, or you might have to drive a remote controlled car into maintenance ducts to fix a broken circuit so a bridge can be extended. It's very in-depth, so much so it can get confusing at times.
It's not all puzzle solving, as there is quite a lot of action too: cultists and mutants threaten the team at every turn. To fight them off, the game gradually unlocks about a dozen weapons, each with its own alternate fire: rapid or charge laser pistols, rockets launchers, proximity bombs, deployable auto turrets, even a stasis field to slow down time. There is a lot of variety in the way you can face the abominations you will meet in the lower strata of the city. It may not be the smoothest combat ever, but if you know Core Design, you already know the shooting was never their forte, and it doesn't significantly harm the experience. Furthermore, dying is only a temporary setback in Project EDEN, as the developers saw fit to remove the frustration factor by allowing the player to respawn each dead operative at set regeneration points, rather than going back to a checkpoint. A wise decision, since the puzzle-solving aspect is the main course of the game, and too much emphasis on action would have gotten in the way.
If you're looking for a lengthy and deep action puzzle experience that doesn't hold your hand at all and provides a huge sense of accomplishment when things click together to find the solution, this overlooked gem is exactly the game for you. I can't recommend it enough.
It does have action elements but it is mainly a puzzle orientated adventure game, much like Tomb Raider. The setting is fantastic, a delve into the lower parts of a cyberpunk mega-city where the buildings and foundations become increasingly dilapidated and unstable.
You're taking control of four characters with their own abilities and you'll be combining them a lot during the course of the game. With four characters in tow comes a rudimentary command system allowing you to command the three remaining characters to follow or hold their position. It does work for the most part, although with how precise you have to be with the platforming the AI will follow your exact path of travel, often leading to the team members at the back getting lost and requiring you to manually switch back to them.
What is noticeable from the start is that there is no jump button. Instead you will be ascending and descending ledges in the map geometry, which can lead to some confusion with judging if a drop will kill your character or at the least deal some damage.
And that's the primary reason for why Project Eden hasn't aged the best. Its slow and methodical way of doing things is archaic and leads to a lot of frustration in the gameplay when you're forced to repeat an action multiple times to move along in a level.
The shooting is basic but the weapons you pick up throughout the story do freshen things up when it starts getting repetitive shooting fellas with the basic weapon. A couple of cool gadgets show up early on in the game, presented in such a way that you know when you'll have to use them for puzzle-solving.
Prepare to get lost every now and again, the 3D environments aren't much to look at now, but compared to what was around in 2001, it's pretty impressive. Sometimes you'll miss an item you were supposed to pick up, a button to press or a thing to shoot but the game makes a good effort in pointing you towards the right direction and letting you figure out what you've missed.
I do feel a bit of nostalgia for the game and that most likely weighs a bit in on my rating but after going over fifteen years originally playing it on the PS2 and coming back to it, I certainly still see a great game despite the aging and the flaws it has.