Review: Eastward Eases on Down the Road in Beautiful but Wheel-Spinning Fashion

The game’s aesthetic is wondrous, but you may remember Eastward most for its disrespect for the player’s time.

Eastward
Photo: Chucklefish

All of the right ingredients for a truly heartwarming, triumphant little RPG exist within Eastward. And yet, as it plods on, pushing its various goalposts further and further away with every scene, it’s clear that no game in recent memory has ever needed an editor more. The poster child for an unnecessarily bloated gaming experience in 2021 should be some AAA open-world action title with a thousand collectibles scattered across its environs, not a beautiful Legend of Zelda-inspired indie such as this one.

Eastward tells the story of John, a mute, bearded miner living in the underground shantytown of Potcrock, where he plays guardian to Sam, a precocious little girl with flowing white locks. Humanity is living through a sort of post-post apocalypse, where the surface world has been deemed forbidden. After Sam forces John to rescue her after getting lost in a perilous part of town, the two are banished from their homes and forced up to survive above ground in our lush and beautiful but cursed Earth, whose friendly, bustling, and eccentric settlements are periodically sieged by a black, life-swallowing mass called the Miasma.

That’s an intriguing and evocative prologue, which is matched by a playfully colorful and expressive aesthetic courtesy of the developers at the Shanghai-based Pixpil. But it’s one that should have taken all of an hour to play out. Instead, it stretches out to an interminable four thanks to piles upon piles of padded dialogue, goofy comic relief sections that go nowhere, and repetitive harping on the quest at hand. The actual gameplay is introduced through a few short dungeons, but none of them particularly advance what we know about this world either. The game’s title card doesn’t even show up until halfway through that introductory period.

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The game’s aesthetic is wondrous—all abstract representations, squiggly lines, and unconventional exaggerations, with an impressive amount of animation frames involved in every movement or facial expression. Its mechanics aren’t even attempting to hide its classic RPG influences, particularly The Legend of Zelda and Earthbound. There’s even a full-fledged Dragon Quest-inspired RPG built into this one. But these borrowed parts have been well utilized by the developers. Zelda’s simplified combat and rewarding exploration marries well with the game’s dedication to turning tried-and-true genre conceits on their head, and the world here feels at once familiar just off-kilter enough to sustain the player’s curiosity.

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There’s also the fact that you control John and Sam at the same time, swapping between them at will. John is able to directly kill monsters with weaponry, and Sam is able to defend and stun enemies. The two can also be split up, separated by barriers or obstacles, and must figure out how to manipulate switches, obstacles, or even the enemy placement, killing very specific ones down a path or lighting up particular plants in order to get themselves to the exit. All of that is difficult enough to be challenging, especially the tricky, hard-hitting bosses, but never impossible. Which is to say that the game’s puzzles, at their best, really make the player feel smart without ever feeling like they’re an excuse for the developers to flex their own smarts.

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In the end, though, this is a game that prioritizes quantity over quality. The writing is fun, often funny, sometimes even poignant, heartbreaking, even distressingly grim and allegorical. But there are too few scenes across Eastward that don’t feel distended with dialogue. A melancholy story of a lonely village woman falling in love with Sam and not knowing how to communicate with him stretches on in a circular conversation with no payoff for the length of an episode of a sitcom. A tense moment of the Miasma consuming a town is delayed so you can go on a fetch quest for cooking ingredients for a bet. That quest itself gets derailed so you can help the town’s theater troupe. And none of these activities are optional.

Eastward, in short, is stifled by dead air, though there’s also a sense here that the developers never quite figured out where to concentrate their efforts. There’s one evocative storyline involving a lesbian scientist, Ava, and her tense, worried partner, Isobel, and another involving a father, William, hiding a secret about his son, Daniel, but both are underserved. Even the game’s primary human antagonist, Solomon—who looks and acts like Transmetropolitan’s Spider Jerusalem—never gets the fully fleshed out backstory or motivation that the developers had more than enough time to bring to fruition throughout the campaign.

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Eastward wouldn’t be this frustrating if it didn’t get so much right when the narrative stays on target. There are numerous moments here that are truly alive to the strangeness of this world that might have truly inspired our awe, even our empathy for the characters, if we weren’t also being saddled with the frustration of wondering when the game is going to get on with the program. The payoff for the player’s patience isn’t without its power, but it’s also a bit of a missed opportunity. There are riches aplenty scattered across its protracted campaign, but you may remember Eastward most for its disrespect for the player’s time.

The game was covered with a review code provided by PressEngine.

Score: 
 Developer: Pixpil  Platform: Switch  Release Date: September 16, 2021  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Fantasy Violence, Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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