Let me begin by warning the completionists out there like me: PixelJunk Eden will frustrate you and waste hours of your time if you let it. Don't be tempted to go for the "Open All Seeds" achievements on any but the first few gardens (levels). The game gives you no tools to find any seeds that you've missed and most of the gardens later in the game are huge with at least a couple seeds in really obscure locations. To top it off there is a finite amount of life rejuvenating crystals in each map so there is a very real cap to how long you can spend searching before you can't sustain yourself anymore, die and have to start all over. I likely would have given this game a higher rating had I stopped playing at 10 hours instead of 20.
And what a pleasant first 10 hours it was. The experience included eye-catching visuals, a unique and fitting soundtrack, simple yet challenging enough gameplay and some good level design with plenty of variety. It had a relaxing feel to it. In the early to mid levels health crystals were plentiful enough that I hardly paid attention to the life bar. I'll admit that the soundtrack didn't appeal to my tastes but there seems to be a lot of praise out there for it. There were a couple tracks I liked and the rest at least weren't grating.
In my mind the life system that is constantly ticking down and needing to be refilled was a very poor design choice for this type of game. In a game all about exploration, collecting things and taking in the sights and sounds, why impose an unnecessary time constraint? It would have been better to let players set their own pace and have a more standard health bar so that the enemies still have teeth.
Despite a 6/10 score I’d still recommend this game if you treat it casually. Bring too much hardcore gamer mindset to it and it’s likely to go sour on you.