Eden Genesis is the newest game from Aeterna Noctis developer Aeternum Game Studios. The new release maintains much of Aeterna Noctis’ DNA, such as fluid animation and being tough as nails, though it trades in the dark fantasy world for cyberpunk aesthetics and the Metroidvania-style open world for a level-based, speedrunning-focused platformer. It’s a change that works with the new game design, complementing the studio’s trademark degree of challenge without feeling unfairly punishing.

It’s the year 2072 in Eden Genesis, and cybernetic enhancements to increase your mental and physical abilities are all the rage. Unfortunately, augmented hacker Leah Anderson is diagnosed with Synthetic Neurodegeneration, or SND: a deadly disease caused by cybernetic augmentations with no known cure. Desperate for a solution, she signs up for an experimental treatment at the Free Your Mind corporation, wherein she is sent to a cyberspace version of the city of Eden to undergo trials to purge the SND from her body while uncovering a mysterious conspiracy.

The plot of Eden Genesis borrows more than a little from well-known cyberpunk works, most liberally from The Matrix, Deus Ex and Akira, without bringing all that much of its own to the table. I personally didn’t really mind; the way that these familiar tropes were combined felt more like affectionate homages than idea theft, and the cyberpunk genre isn’t all that well-known for originality anyway.

Eden Genesis takes the often difficult, pixel-perfect platforming of Aeterna Noctis and makes it the centrepiece of Eden Genesis. To unlock new districts of Eden, Leah must unlock new memory nodes by removing SND cores, which she can do by completing platforming and combat trials dotted throughout the city. You are graded for your speed, the number of collectables obtained and whether you took any damage, with only A, S and S+ grades unlocking the memory nodes required to progress through the game.

While in general I don’t really go for 100% completion or speedrunning in other games that I play, Eden Genesis managed to tap into the same impulses as Neon White did for me. With short levels and virtually instantaneous restarts, reattempting each challenge to shave a few seconds off my best time or accomplishing more sub-objectives to attain the best score possible felt engaging and enjoyable rather than a chore.

While the focus on acquiring a high score necessarily places an emphasis on skill, there are some welcome steps taken towards accessibility. There are more levels than required memory cores, meaning that if you are struggling with some challenges or are unable to make the jump from an A to an S grade (rewarding two memory cores instead of only one), you can still make it to the end credits without too much trouble as long as you have a few other S ranks under your belt. Before you tackle a level properly, you can enter an ungraded training mode where you can place checkpoints wherever you like, allowing you to practice the trickier sections as much as you need. There is also an option to make Leah immune to enemy attacks to focus more on the platforming, which some players may find helpful.

The afforementioned levels also lack a training mode and have an annoying three-second timer whenever you reset the stage, making reattempting them much more awkward than in the platforming challenges. It doesn’t matter that the combat features are a bit limited in the platforming sections, as it’s not the focus there. However, when Eden Genesis makes you engage with the combat, you really start to wish for more ranged options beyond a limited-use super-move or some sort of actual dodge mechanic to make the annoying AOE enemy attacks more avoidable.

Despite all that, it helps that Eden Genesis is fairly nice to look at. The game’s use of contrasting colours made navigating its fast-paced levels a breeze, and I loved many of the varied backdrops of each of Eden’s districts. The soundtrack was also a delight, with the moody piano melody of the Eden hub area contrasting nicely with the pulse-pounding techno beats of the individual levels.

Once you have made it to the end of Eden Genesis’ main story, there’s still plenty more to do. In addition to online leaderboards to encourage players to beat each others’ high scores, there is a mirror mode as well as plenty of secret levels and collectables that are hidden around Eden for players to find. Many of these levels are gated off unless you have acquired a certain number of S+ scores, providing a reward for those who have mastered the game’s previous challenges.