Preview: Eden Tomorrow (PSVR)

The range of PSVR titles has changed significantly in the first two years since its launch. Initially, it was mainly rail shooters, but players now usually move relatively freely in the environment. "Eden: Tomorrow" is no different. In the sci-fi adventure game from German developer Soulpix, we control a stranded astronaut and his cheeky drone across an alien planet. Find out why we had fun and have high hopes for the game in our preview.

Some people are said to get dizzy spells when they have to go into a public toilet. Our hero in the science fiction game "Eden: Tomorrow" has bigger problems. His spaceship crashes and he barely manages to escape in an escape capsule. However, he is by no means in a comfortable position. Injured and unable to speak, he is stranded on an unknown planet. A dragon-like monster just happens not to eat him for breakfast and otherwise we would be completely lost on our own. Fortunately, a drone survived the crash alongside us. It calls itself Newton and babbles away as if Wheatley from "Portal 2" had been its godfather. However, according to its makers, "Eden: Tomorrow" has nothing to do with Valve's puzzle adventure. The Hanover-based team, which has so far worked exclusively on 3D animations for film and television, wants to tell a completely different story. It's not just about survival in an alien world with giant worms and dino-like creatures, but also about the fact that AIs can go astray and that our self-controlled drone sidekick may turn against us in the long term.

In "Eden: Tomorrow", you won't be immersed in a classic open-world scenario due to the high story focus. Instead, you will experience a relatively linear story, which should keep you entertained for around five hours after several focus group tests by the manufacturer. Of course, there is still room for exploration, including a series of optional audio dialogues and other found objects that you collect in the world. You yourself are travelling in the role of a crashed astronaut who has a face but no name. At certain points, however, you can slip into the role of the drone Newton, who joins you at the very beginning. The term sidekick would actually be more appropriate for him. In fact, Newton is something like the lynchpin, the character who is actually at the centre of the action.

If you move exclusively on the ground as a pilot (including small sliding and balancing manoeuvres), you float more or less freely in space with Newton. Newton also has special abilities, some of which the astronaut can also use. For example, the drone can ignite an energy pulse to tear down certain surrounding objects. In one of the first missions, however, you have to charge this ability with energy canisters in order to generate sufficient force for a specific obstacle. There is also an environment scanner and an AR view, which make exploration considerably easier, but do not make the game a self-runner.

You cannot switch freely between the two characters at the beginning. This is only possible in the demo if you leave your astronaut in a safe place beforehand. However, we are sure that we will be able to switch at any time later on, not just at certain points, but using a transportable system. In general, chief developer Frank Sennholz promises us that the limitations of the demo will no longer play such a central role in the final game. If, for example, we can only move to a limited extent or not at all in a dialogue with Newton, whereby we are actually only listeners and not really conversation partners due to a damaged larynx, this should be different in the final adventure. There are puzzles and there should also be a somewhat more complex variety later on. However, you shouldn't expect any hard head-scratchers, as evidenced by the makers' statement that the puzzles should be somewhere between "Uncharted 4" and the somewhat more challenging stand-alone expansion "Uncharted: The Lost Legacy". Incidentally, the PSVR exclusivity only came about later. Soulpix had initially planned its sci-fi adventures for the Oculus Rift and relied on Unity 3D instead of the Unreal Engine 4 used today.

The question of all questions

Early on in the game, "Eden: Tomorrow" confronts you in a cave; later on, you will also have to go to the surface of the planet with another pilot's drone that has apparently gone wild. Fortunately, the trapped beast is unable to reach us as we make our way along a narrow ledge on a wall. However, there is no doubt that it wants to kill us. As humorous as the start of the game is, "Eden: Tomorrow" develops quite darkly. Shortly afterwards, the owner of the drone in question tells us in an audio log to destroy our drone immediately at the "first sign of hostile behaviour". It remains to be seen what direction "Eden: Tomorrow" will take. However, we can probably expect that the cooperation with Newton will not stop there in the long term.

Another exciting question is whether we will encounter the human-like indigenous inhabitants of the planet that we learn about in Stone Age-like cave paintings. But do we really want to meet them when their drawings bear witness to sacrificial rituals? In any case, the demo of "Eden: Tomorrow" ends with an encounter with a dragon that abuses another astronaut in front of our eyes to fill its stomach. There may not be any shooting action in this game, not even the possibility of dying. Nevertheless, we are very excited and are looking forward to the final version. However, it will be released exclusively for PlayStation VR sometime in the first quarter of 2019.