Eastward

the game is pretty good...when it actually lets you play it. The visuals are gorgeous. Sound design/OST is great (joel corelitz is among the best). But my god the pacing sucks. WAY too much dialogue and filler between actual gameplay. It's not uncommon to go ~40 minutes being locked into cutscenes and dialogues. And it's not even necessarily that the writing is bad, it's good, but damn man, I just want to PLAY a game, not read it.

4/10. This game looks amazing but is actually pretty bad. It makes you feel like all of the art came first and a game was haphazardly built around it by people with no understanding of game design. It's a damn shame, with better writers and some tweaks it could have been very good. As it is, I think I will just quickly forget it ever existed. Graphics 8/10: No major complaints here. Story 2/10: I kid you not, NOTHING ever makes much sense, even the ending tells you nothing other than "cool, you won". You do stuff because it's there and the game won't let you as much as walk 30m away from your quest marker. Why did John adopt Sam ? Dunno, the game never explains why anything is the way it is. It just is, just shut up and consume product. Whenever something interesting happens, including APOCALYPTIC EVENTS, the game just destroys all tension by introducing some inane chapter where you talk to monkeys or some similar nonsense. This is not helped by the dialogue, there is an insane amount of it and yet none of it is used to flesh out the story. The story will bring up many questions and answer almost none of them. Why does the antagonist do this? No idea, you get something vague about "improving mankind" and that's it. Why does Sam not remember? Because it's more convenient for the plot. Etc. There is no depth to anything. It's just a sequence of events, most of which you wish you could skip because they feel completely irrelevant. Combat 4/10: It exists. You hit things with a pan. You also have other weapons, 2 out of 3 do seemingly nothing useful in battle (the increase in range is pathetic) and have limited uses. The last one is an endgame item but it works at least. You move very slowly which is very fun when some mobs run twice as fast and everything does contact damage. Some bosses do more damage by walking in a random direction while you attack than with their actual attacks. You don't have a dodge, a dash or a block so you just walk away slowly or have Sam try to stun the mob, if she doesn't miss you can them mash the attack button to win (this is the best strategy for every "difficult" mob in the game and even some bosses). Sam also grants you a second hitbox so you can get hit more. Mini-bosses will target her even if you parked her outside the arena. You can also enter with only Sam, ensuring you perish as she does no damage. Gameplay 4/10: Puzzles are fine, too simple but somewhat fun. Sometimes you might get stumped because they require you to do something you didn't even know you could do such as charging Sam's shot to increase range (it is sloooooow and very situational). The timed puzzles still kinda suck, I think they could have come up with something cooler for a section with time loops than a time limit. Other than that welcome to missable content hell, you usually get one visit to each area, that's it. Don't assume you need a new ability that you'll get back later, areas basically cease to exist once you advance the plot and you may be arbitrarily locked out of sub-areas at any point in time. So yeah you can miss a bunch of upgrades or entire abilities, 50% of Sam's abilities are entirely missable, their upgrade is also missable. Sam herself can lock you out of getting them because she decides for you when you can and cannot leave town, don't forget you are on rails, you are not free to explore or make decisions ever. Some NPCs may have goodies for you but you aren't told which ones, most just assault you with terrible dialogue. You also get interrupted CONSTANTLY by cutscenes and they usually bore the hell out of you to ensure a consistent level of player hatred directed at NPCs. Dialogue 1/10: Generally pointless and unfunny it will answer every question you do not have and do nothing to help the anemic story. Includes too many references to the much better game Earthbound even though the devs clearly don't get why Earthbound works. Sex jokes are present as well for some reason and are of course done poorly. I do not know who the hell thought the glory hole joke was a good idea but it is here. The characters are not really developed and don't make much sense, they are more like props. You won't ever care about them. John is mute making him one of the best written characters. He's still poorly written since you have no idea as to why he does anything he does. Sam is a silly, outspoken kid who for some reason has nothing to say about some major events. She could get the ability to resurect the dead by blinking twice or see you eating babies medium rare and she would think and say nothing. This make her feel fake, at least you could rationalize John as having some kind of mystery condition behind his silence, Sam just blatantly doesn't make sense. Sometimes she is a character and sometimes she is a silent prop.

It's honestly hard to say if I'd recommend playing this game to others. However, in the end I asked myself, would I recommend playing this game to MYSELF. In an ideal world, Steam would allow us to give a neutral review, but here we are. Below are my ratings for the game, and below that will be my longer review: Story: 1/5 Gameplay: 4/5 Art: 5/5 Music: 4/5 Overall, I would rate this game a 3 out of 5 stars. Right in the middle. There are so many things it does really well. Gameplay mechanics are fun. Gives me the nostalgic vibe of playing Link's Awakening with some added features. Soundtrack is fun and memorable and pixel art and animation is PHENOMENAL. Unfortunately it falls short in the most important aspect, story. Story is so so so important to me in video games. And I understand some people care more about gameplay. However, if a story doesn't really catch me, then I'm not going to continue playing. The story for Eastward starts off very, very intriguing. Lots of mystery, lots of things you want to discover. But when you progress, it just got more and more confusing. The lore is either wildly confusing or just poorly told. At the very end of the game, I have no idea why the game even ended. I didn't understand how we resolved anything. Lots of character motivations left unanswered and I have no idea why we did any of the stuff we did. I'm for sure going to go find some youtube video that explains everything to me, but I feel like I should write this review before I get any outside opinion so I can give an honest take on how my experience was. I was able to power through the game mainly because I have it on my steamdeck and I would just play it on all my lunch breaks. I'd love to see more from this studio with how beautiful their art and animation is. But I would prefer they stay away from any time based storytelling in future games.

Sadly: nope. **Amazingly beautiful unique art, but that's all.** Game designers should not feel entitled to make a player click through thousands of dialog textboxes when the designer isn't capable of writing a single worthwhile sentence. (And there's no option for faster message speed or for more words in a bigger textbox. There's a fast-forward button in-game but then it's too fast and you miss instructions.) It's perfectly fine to lack writing skills, it's not fine to lack writing skills and then put this many sentences into a videogame. Overall bad game-feel. Eastward fails at things that game designers knew how to do well 40 years ago: --Exits/entrances to rooms is not visually clear, even though this was never a problem in SNES games. It violates the norms of 2D RPG's by having many invisible walls where there's no visible barrier. --Enemies -Enemies respawn a few seconds after you (tediously) kill them. -The "gameplay" of hitting slug enemies with weapon doesn't feel fun on a mechanical input/response level. -When the slugs drop from the ceiling, it feels like padding because there's no game there. -Enemy hitboxes and behaviors are not programmed in a way that is interesting to engage with. --"Cooking" does not feel good or interesting to do. --Puzzles. Tedious power-line "puzzles" to power up doors is not fun or good. Wind turbines that restrict your character or push bombs around are not fun or good. (Pushing furniture to find secrets is fine.) --Environmental hazard, a certain thing a fair bit into the game, is cheap toward the player and not fun to evade. You'll die 10 times in a row. You'll also have to do tedious box puzzles in the middle of the environmental hazard, and the game design is so bad that you'll have no visual clue which way the boxes can be moved. Not only is it obnoxiously unfun but it also shows the developers have no ideas for gameplay, it's not a big difference from random death. Then you're confronted with a hazard that you can't possibly evade...then the story interrupts with a deus ex machina rescue. Pathetically bad game design. --Sloppy bad sound design for example no GUI sound effect when you press Exit/Cancel button to exit menu...and there's also a slight delay when exiting menus, which is why the lack of sound effect creates terrible feel. --It doesn't feel fun to walk around. I found myself just going to the next dull map marker point just to get it over with. (And again: I LOVE THE ART, the artist work is excellent!) --Even the excellent art has some weaknesses, like the non-pixel-art GUI pop-ups for items. It clashes with the rest of the aesthetic. And for example, when the player holds X to make the girl character do a magic charge the GUI pop-up isn't programmed well. --Tedious fetch quests whenever you're in the starting town area. --Story, Characters, Writing: all terrible. Random nonsensical villainy and creepiness, random weird "good" characters with terrible dialog (the jester, the woman in the forest town). It's embarrassingly bad. Many game devs inspired by Earthbound don't pay the slightest attention to any of the elements that made Earthbound good. Why can't we have good videogames?

I just can't find myself pushing myself past New Dam City. The gameplay is servicable, but repetitive. The narrative has potential, but I find myself exhausted with the writing and dialogue. I don't regret my purchase, nor do I think the game is inherently flawed. It certainly requires a certain breed of individual to really love this game. I don't happen to be the type of person who can love this game.

Could have left a negative review just as easy, but chose to be nice. This game is right down the middle for me. There were just as many times to where I thought to myself wow, this game is awesome, and I absolutely cant wait to just be done with it. The graphics are awesome, the story is fun, I enjoy the characters, a LOT of positives.....but some things with the game just really hold it back. Some the areas can feel like a chore to go through, with chapters having weird lengths, some being a lot longer than others and feeling REALLY drug out. The puzzles are for the most part really easy, with some of them out of nowhere being extremely annoying trying to figure out what you're supposed to do, and same with the boss battles. There were several times I wanted to quit just cause I had no idea how to beat something or what to do having to look up guides to understand unexplained things. Worth playing through once though, idk if I'd do it again but I'd give it a shot on sale. The game is very unique, really cool, just with a lot of patience.

I'm 2 chapters in and the game has no idea what it wants to be. There's lengthy sections of nothing but dialogue for 30+ mins, which makes you think they're going for a linear story game. But then there's hidden upgrades which are MISSABLE, and there's no chest tracking. If you go left instead of right you're locked on that path and can't go back to explore. You can replay chapters after beating the story but there isn't a chest tracker so you're basically forced to replay the entire game if you miss 1 chest. The dungeons and puzzles are super basic (push buttons, destroy walls etc). Combat is slow and clunky, you're locked in place when attacking and there's no dodge button. There are fast-paced chases with the "miasma" where you have to play perfectly or you'll die. It just doesn't fit the pacing of the game. It also auto saves you on 1hp between rooms so you can get softlocked if you can't avoid damage... On a positive note, this is some of the best pixel art I have seen. The soundtrack is great, and I absolutely love the character and world design, it's very reminiscent of Professor Layton on the DS. 80% of reviews recommend the game, yet only 16% actually finished the story. It's not adding up. I feel like people are recommending it solely because it looks pretty. Very mixed on this so if you're not having fun by the end of chapter 1 I'd recommend getting a refund.