Review: Eastward
Eastward is a top-down, pixel art, narrative-driven role-playing game published by Chucklefish and developed by Chinese developer Pixpil. I was drawn into the world of Eastward with its fantastic visuals and unique character design. It has undeniable charm and offers some innovative gameplay particularly in its minigames. However, a convoluted story, flat characters and frustrating gameplay mechanics mired this game to the point where, by the last chapters of my playthrough, I wasn’t having fun anymore.
Eastward is a game with huge potential, it has so much going for it: a cool visual style that harkens back to great old Nintendo classics like EarthBound, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy. It wears those references proudly on its sleeve, it even features an entire playable game within the game called “EarthBorn,” that I’ll come back to later. Overall, it’s dripping with nostalgia but still has some amazing 21st century graphics. In particular, the water, foliage and “miasma” were just so cool and while the game felt like an homage to the old titles, it certainly lived up to a modern aesthetic in that regard.
Combat and Gameplay
Unfortunately, the great graphics and style did not make up for frustrating gameplay particularly in regards to combat and story progression. Eastward really likes to take its time with its story. At times, the slow pace felt like a meditation that added to the feeling of making the best of a tough situation, but mostly it felt constipated. Fetch quests and mandatory side missions would make areas quickly feel stale. Every objective had character development which did help flesh out the world, but as I’ll talk about later in this review, despite the attempt I think it mostly failed in that regard.
Combat in Eastward was frustrating and often felt unfair. You are armed with an arsenal of interesting weapons. For instance, your main weapon throughout the game was a frying pan. But the speed at which you unlock new weapons and abilities and the difficulty spike of enemies in the mid-game felt uneven. Enemies rarely give you time to charge your weapon or abilities, and unclear hitboxes or invulnerability frames would often lead to missed hits or accidental damage. With no dodge roll or evasive maneuvers, your best bet is to back up and wait for enemies to come to you or heal through the damage. Frequent healing also required opening a menu that would pause combat, throwing off the flow. Bosses were often easier to beat than regular mobs because they, at least usually, had consistent mechanics. By the end of the game, I dreaded going into the dungeon areas because the combat was so frustrating.
Despite the issues with combat, Eastward’s many dungeons did have some really nice puzzles that made them a little more bearable. In general, they felt challenging but never so much as I had to look up how to solve them online. I particularly liked a brief section where you had to sneak past a bunch of guards, it was little asides like this that broke up the gameplay and were, in my opinion, some of the best parts of the game. However, because of the combat issues, I would often leave areas unexplored. It’s really too bad that a game that put so much work into creating beautiful landscapes and interesting puzzles would have areas skipped because of irritating gameplay issues.
As I mentioned, the best sections of the game are where it strayed from its normal gameplay loop. Minigames like a quick aside to rally some floating pigs for a farmer by hitting them with your frying pan, or the Breath of the Wild style cooking minigame where a slot machine would determine the quality of your dish were really innovative and fun. The real gem was its game-within-a-game “EarthBorn,” an old-school turn-based RPG where you have 7 days to defeat the “Demon King,” who plagues the land, with a group of unlikely adventurers. The game is impossible to beat on your first try, but by using items you get in the outerworld from another clever coin-slot vending machine game gives you keys, revive items and power ups you can use permanently in subsequent playthroughs. I found that “EarthBorn” was honestly more fun than the larger game it was a part of.
Audio and Music
Eastward’s sound design was thoughtful and evocative of the best old-school adventure games and the music was delightful, but repetitive at times. Treasure chest opens and the cooking minigame had particularly memorable jingles. But, not to harp on combat yet again, but it would have been nice if more monsters had sound cues before their wind-ups. The music was really quite good, very bold and endearing, however I did feel like it got stale by the end of the game. It felt like certain characters or areas should have had different musical queues; instead it often relied on the same limited set of music throughout the game only opening up the repertoire near the end of the game.
Story
Unfortunately for a heavily story-driven game, the story in Eastward felt convoluted and while not completely predictable, ultimately unsatisfying. I think the most egregious aspect of the story was the complete lack of character development, particularly of the main characters and flat or confusing side characters. It is possible that there was some stuff lost in the English translation of the game, but for the most part I don’t think that excuses the often disjointed ambitions and attitudes of the characters. I’ll give some examples, but beware of spoilers below.
We’ll start with John, the main character who you play throughout the game, who is silent. It is not uncommon to have a muted main character, however in order to give that character depth they either need to be very emotive or have very clear motives in the story. John has neither. It’s clear he cares about Sam, a child he’s decided to adopt and follow to the ends of the earth, but every time he’s asked about intentions or feelings, he gives the same character animation where he scratches the back of his neck. It’s fine to have a character that is stoic, but with John it mostly felt flat.
Sam, the secondary character and intrigue of the game, is obnoxious and even apathetic at times. The narrative will reveal game-changing plot points or an NPC will evolve the story and Sam seemingly forgets everything every time, instead remaining clueless and childish until the very end of the game. The idea that she’s incapable of processing trauma and just shunts it into her subconscious feels like a lazy way of leaving questions unanswered and pushing the story forward with a faultless protagonist even though it’s clear she’s not. I kept asking myself, “isn’t John horrified by the atrocities Sam is committing?” She literally brings on the destruction of an entire town early in the game without repercussion.
The overarching story for the game left me scratching my head, it felt like it was meant to be deep but it was just confusing. The game was also pretty conservative; it felt ripe for queer characters or any act of political subversion, a critique of capital or just something profound but ultimately felt like a lazy interpretation of stories long ago told in better forms like Evangelion or The Matrix. Side characters were so often disappointing with their interesting relationships but confusing motives. For instance you could try to read Alva and Isabel as a queer couple in the game, they are two women living together, obviously protective of each other and they even mention a love between them, but it turns out Isabel is just a robot guardian with a more maternal relationship with Alva and it felt like the game went out of its way to make sure the subtext doesn’t add up
Conclusion
Eastward felt like it had huge potential. It would get my hopes up with a neat mechanic or interesting characters but then consistently disappoint, which made playing it that much more painful. I wanted to fall in love with the characters but I was constantly confused by their motivations. I wanted to get into the quirky combat but it was tough, unforgiving and not fun. The game has an amazing visual style and had some innovative minigames that made up for some of the shortcomings of the game but overall it fell short of its aesthetic. Had this game come out when I was a kid I think it would have been an instant classic, but in a competitive market of old-school style, nostalgia-driven RPGs, in my opinion, it didn’t meet up with modern-day standards.