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• gamedeal user

  Aug 29, 2022

  Eastward is a game that's trying to be too many things at once. A dark and gritty post-apocalyptic sci-fi narrative; a love-letter to 8 and 16-bit JRPGs; a tough dungeon-crawler with full-action combat and puzzle-solving; a fun adventure with goofy, lovable characters; the journey of a stoic man and his cheery, optimistic daughter. Parts of it really work, like the artstyle, world, and characters. Others really don't. The story and tone feel whiplash-inducing at times, telling a tale I think is far darker than necessary (given the endearing characters and goofy moments), and the game's combat system is honestly very poor. The plot is revealed piece-meal, dragged along by vague dialogue and a veneer of mystery, that ultimately never lives up to its full potential. With that said, the game is extremely beautiful, the characters are super memorable, and the soundtrack is outstanding; and by buying it, you're supporting a type of game that really doesn't get made much anymore. To me it's worth it for those things alone, but it certainly isn't the greatest game I've played.
• gamedeal user

  May 26, 2023

  I absolutely LOVED this game and 100% percent recommend it. I'm at an age where free time is scarce so I'll give a game 1 hour or 2 and if it doesn't manage to make me want to play the next day then I'm off to the next one. Needless to say this doesn't happen often, but Eastward was the exception. Now of course what one person can love another can hate so I'll give a bit more detail on what this game is about and what it isn't about so you can guess if you'll enjoy it. Some people might see a couple of action shots in the trailer and think this is a combat-focused action RPG and they are gonna be disappointed. The game is primarily narrative-based. The storytelling is it's strongest part. Beautiful scenery, lovable characters, hart-warming story, etc. If you played games like Final Fantasy 9 or Chrono Trigger you know what you can expect in terms of world building and storytelling. The game took me a lot of time because I kept coming back to talk to everyone after every quest to see if they had some new dialogue options. If you are the kind of person who goes "skip, skip, skip" then I'd recommend you "skip" the whole game and play something else. Now what about the gameplay? It consists mostly of dungeons or designated combat-enabled areas where you fight monsters, solve puzzles, encounter bosses plus a couple mini-games from time to time. While the combat becomes harder and the puzzles more complex in the last hour or so of gameplay, don't expect a Dark Souls. You'll probably be able to beat most bosses the first time which is perfect for this game. Since having to try 20 times to defeat the same boss would completely destroy the narrative pacing. You can avoid cooking food if you want to increase the difficulty a bit. Now that doesn't mean the combat/puzzle sections feel like a chore. I've found them to be just long enough to be really enjoyable and they contribute to pushing the story forward. I really cool detail though is that you can play a game within the game. You can find consoles where you can play a traditional turn-based RPG, together with Amiibo-like gacha. It is a pretty cool short game you can play between quests and it's not just some random game, it's actually < SPOILERS > So that's basically it. If you had the patience to read all the way through here without going "tl;dr" after the first paragraph then you probably will love this game.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 17, 2021

  At 38 I rarely sit down to play for 4.5 hours straight. This game transported me back to the feeling I had when I was a kid playing these story heavy 2d games. It is my favorite 2d game and quickly becoming of all time for all games. The characters are so lovely. If it pulls some emotional strings further in the story it may reside with the all time greats.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 28, 2021

  Eastward is a real tricky game to talk about. Right off the bat, mood and pacing and flavor and theme are all over the place! The biggest hurdle for me is that the game's method of storytelling is at direct odds with its intentional SNES [i]Legend of Zelda[/i] gameplay model. The story itself is linear, literally from left to right, as you travel on a train going in one direction, stopping a few times to see what life is like, and then moving on. You're a tourist with a one-way ticket. The gameplay is Zelda-esque in that you gain new items and upgrades, opening new possibilities for combat and puzzles. But, because there is no backtracking, all of the air is taken out of that. In a [i]Zelda[/i]-like you might see a cracked wall near the beginning section of the game and then return gleefully when you get bombs. Every new item or upgrade let's you think, "now how can I apply this to what I've already experienced?" But because Eastward is all about going forward, there's nothing to reflect on. There ARE no cracked walls before you get bombs, there ARE no flammable plants before you get the Flamethrower. Everything you can and will do with your new items are things you haven't encountered yet. This is made more glaringly obvious by enemy design. As you move forward, enemies also change completely. So when you upgrade your weapon, you never actually feel if its stronger because you're fighting new enemies instead of familiar ones. There's a satisfaction in going back to an enemy that used to give you grief and beating them casually with your upgrades. Eastward doesn't do that too often. In fact it kind of feels like you're powering down in some cases. The enemies in the previous chapter took 4 hits with your LV.1 weapon, and now enemies in this chapter take 6 hits with your LV.2 weapon. Maybe they would take 12 hits if your weapon were still LV.1, but how would you know? (To be fair, there's a gauntlet of previous enemies near the end of the game, but by that point it'd been so long that I couldn't remember what they were like to fight against.) As for the story, its best idea is super unrealized. [spoiler]I loved the drama of going to Greenberg in Chapter 2, feeling the place out, and then having to escape it as it was overcome with Miasma.[/spoiler] What a ride! Is this the game? Going from place to place like a vagabond—world-hopping, in a sense—and then moving on, no looking back, little tastes of culture as we head Eastward!? Mmmmm'kinda. In the end, you only visit, like, 3 places after you board the train (not counting another train you visit while on the tracks). So this really cool idea is dropped almost as soon as it's offered. There's a moment in the ending where you reflect back on all the places you've been and it's mostly a bunch of shots from New Dam City in Chapter 3 where you stayed at the longest. Part of me thinks the game is supposed to be all about New Dam City, and the other places are just floppy bookends. Oh and the reason you stay at New Dam City the longest is that suddenly it becomes a bunch of anime filler episodes where two entire dungeon sections are dedicated wholly to finding ingredients for a meal to appease some random guy for zero stakes, and then you go to a hot springs for five minutes just because Hot Spring Episode! It's at this moment that I realized the team wasn't sure what kind of story they wanted to tell. Is it a Father/Daughter survival thing like Telltale's [i]The Walking Dead[/i] or [i]The Last of Us[/i]? Is it an [i]Around the World in 80 Days[/i] travel adventure? Is it a character study about a man who had lost all hope? Is it a slice of life anime? Is it a [i]Groundhog Day[/i] style time loop narrative? Is it a post-apocalypse "let's rebuild the world" scenario? Or a generic Good-versus-Evil fantasy? Or is everything a science fiction [i]Matrix[/i]-style simulation we're trying to break free from? Yes. To all of that. But not enough to feel intentional. There's a cooking minigame. You can throw in totally odd ingredients and make something completely unreasonable. Octopus, cherries, and chicken will somehow make a delicious looking hamburger. And it does look like a good burger! Eastward is a lot like that cooking minigame. You have a pan with milk and crab and cheese and whole pumpkins and a pineapple—all these completely random ingredients!—just flopping around over a blue flame, and then POOF, it says "here's your Perfectly Normal Fruit Pie!" And you believe it. It looks like Fruit Pie. But when you take a bite you know the truth.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 19, 2021

  I would say it is quite good but with one potential caveat. The caveat is this: It's a very story-focused game and for that reason it is heavy with unskippable cutscenes. At time of writing, I'm about 13 hours into the game, and it feels to me like it's about 70% cutscene and 30% gameplay. So if you are a person who finds themselves yelling "JUST SHUT UP AND LET ME PLAY" at your games a lot, then this game might test your patience in that department. HOWEVER That being said, everything is high quality and the story and characters are good. The pixel art is fantastic, the music is great, and the gameplay parts---when the game lets you play them---are really good. The dungeons are fun to explore and solve. They feel very classic zelda -like with their combination of very simple but creative combat and puzzle ideas, which are engaging but not overly taxing. The very occasional boss battles are interesting and challenging and shake things up a little bit, but they are not aggravating and do not drag out too long. The gameplay parts are great, and I really wish the game had a little bit more of it in there. While I caution that story and cutscenes feel like they take up too large a portion of the experience, it is obvious that Pixpil put a lot of effort into making the story parts of it fun and entertaining. And while I find myself often wishing some of these cutscenes or dialogues had a fast forward button, I am interested in seeing how the rest of the story goes. *update* I'll be honest... I ended up not finishing it. I started playing another game and tried to come back to it, and having to sit through another hour of constantly pressing A to manually skip through cutscenes was just not that appealing to me. Loved what I played of the gameplay parts, and I wouldn't even say that the story is bad, but visual novel is not my genre, and this game has way too much cutscene. I spend too much time feeling unengaged by the looong stretches without actual gameplay in the game. I hate to give it a thumbs down, so I won't, but if I'm being completely honest with you, I ended up losing interest in it over time due to the frequency, length, and obstinate unskippability of cutscenes.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 7, 2021

  This review was not edited after writing so I apologize for any potential grammar or wording mistakes. TLDR: Good art style but boring, chaotic story. The full review: I've just finished the game - it took me 32 hours including winning the mini-RPG arcade game within the game (once). It's difficult for me to write this review. I believe people should try games on their own before reading too much about them but I feel like Eastward is being advertised (at least by some part of the community) as something that it is not. But let's start at the beginning. The game starts off strong and the plot seems interesting enough. The art direction if phenomenal, not enough good things can be said about it. Pixel-art games are plentiful these days, to the point where I slowly start losing fascination with this genre (?), but Eastward proves that if it’s done right, a pixel-art game can not only look fantastic but in many aspects will be superior to titles which are based more on detailed visual representation of events and less on a player’s imagination. Eastward’s animations are spot on, colors of each location reflect its mood and the whole package is simply wonderful to look at even if most items are static only. The music, too, works very well. Some of Eastward’s tracking are interesting enough for me to consider buying the soundtrack and listening to the on their own so that I can better understand their composition and written in ideas. It’s nostalgic, relaxing, something menacing but always at the right moment. However, the game suffers very much from low writing level and this is an unforgivable sin in my world in which I play video games for a story first and foremost. There are interesting elements all over the game but unfortunately, they just don’t stick together. Events are chaotic, or chaotically depicted, characters are well overwritten and simply talk way too much and about trivial things that pull attention away from main or even side story lines. The story itself is hard to follow and ultimately ends up incoherent. And mind the plot lasts about 25 hours and there’s lots of material to get through – I think about 10 hours in my first “wait, what?” came up and stayed with me for the most of the game afterwards. I think Eastward tries very hard to be philosophical but philosophy has its own rhythm of asking questions leading to others questions and the plot in the game doesn’t quite nail it. Sure, some smart line or two are thrown our way but they get lost in this weird way of telling the story. I have nothing against weird stories of course, there are many of them around the market and some are incredibly satisfying (Hollow Knight, What Remains of Edith Finch, etc.) but the ones that work well have a definitive plot line discovered by players one way or another. Eastward gets lost in its own story, making it difficult for players to follow it. This game is not Zelda-like, like some players try to suggest. It has a couple of dungeons (some of which are very good) but probably around 60% of Eastward is looking at speech bubbles (well animated speech bubbles, though) and reading what characters have to stay. There’s also no way to skip them so if you’re not into reading, you may have to rethink your purchase. Eastward is a story-based game with a lot of weird cutscenes and occasional dungeons. There’s also no real sense of character progress unless you count in extra hearts and some few weapons you get along the way. I played though the whole game because I can’t afford too many of them these days and once I purchase something I try to at least finish it but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to quit a few times because ultimately the weak, or weakly told story made it way more boring than it should be.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 12, 2022

  This game is very, very text heavy. I really should've read the reviews before purchasing. I'm 11 hours in and feel like I've gone nowhere. I think I've been through two boss fights, which were very easy and predictable. It is very clear that this game is more about the story than the gameplay. The puzzles and combat have been incredibly simple so far. I wouldn't really say this is a visual novel, but it's pretty close to it. The dialogue has been very tedious at times. I'm recommending just because the game is visually stunning.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 28, 2022

  [quote][b]Personal Rating:[/b] 8/10[/quote] [table] [tr] [th][h1]✅Pros:[/h1][/th] [th][h1]❌Cons:[/h1][/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]* Charming graphics and atmosphere. * Nice storytelling. * Interesting characters. * Very nice soundtrack. * Smooth gameplay.[/td] [td]* The story, although good, is predictable. * Cutscenes can be too long. * Simplistic combat and puzzles. * Map and dungeon exploration feels lackluster.[/td] [/tr] [/table] [h1]💬First impressions on Eastward[/h1] A strong presentation is important and Eastward does make a good first impression with its pixel graphics and cartoon artstyle. Eastward is beautifully crafted, you can feel that everything was created with care and thought put into it, and this is what had me instantly drawn to this game. [h1]🌟A colorful world:[/h1] Eastward puts a lot of work into its graphics and every location is rich and full of details and small touches that breathe life into the game. Each region is a sight to behold and even random houses and shops are given a lot of attention. Most of the cast in this title consists of unique characters with very few examples sharing the same sprites. The game does its best to give every character, even the most minor ones, unique looks and personalities of their own. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2787164462 [h1]🎮A smooth gameplay experience[/h1] Eastward's gameplay is done from a top-down perspective, or bird's-eye view. It can clock anywhere from 12 to 20 hours depending how slow you want to take it. Unlike most games of this genre Eastward follows a linear, chapter-based, storyline with little space for exploration and rarely offers sidequests. You move between regions after certain chapters but once you leave one you cannot go back to it.  While exploration is not the main focus of the game, some chapters feature larger open areas for you to visit and find secrets. Controls are fluid and work very well. Although a controller is recommended, the Mouse + Keyboard setting works just fine and there weren't any notable issues with it, be it during combat or during puzzle solving. You also have access to a very simple cooking mini-game, which has a slot machine to get better bonuses, and cooking is one of the best ways to get potent healing items early on. Lastly there's Earth Born, a side mini-game highly reminiscent of old era RPGs as well. [h1]👨‍👧Our two heroes[/h1] During your journey you'll control two characters: John and Sam. Both often travel together and you are able to freely switch between them (once you've gained control of Sam) and there will be times where each character will have to go solo for a while. John is often used to break things or move heavy objects out of the way. He is also the main fighter of the duo and will be used to kill 99% of enemies you'll face. Sam on the other hand can interact with the environment granting access to more places or dealing with stuff John can't break, however she can't kill the vast majority of enemies on her own. Puzzles often rely on each of the characters unique aspects, such as John's strength or Sam's power, sometimes requiring constant switching between each to open paths so they can progress. Most of the time the puzzles are fairly simple and don't get too difficult, although some can give you a moment of pause. [h1]🗡Combat[/h1] Fighting in Eastward is simple and straightforward: as John you whack things using a frying pan, or blow them up with bombs, or blast them with a ranged weapon. You are able to upgrade John's ranged weapons with gear parts found in chests. Sam gains a ranged power that can paralyze enemies and leave them vulnerable to John's attacks giving good synergy. She also has access to other (optional) powers, but Sam's role, for the most part, remains firmly on the support side. Enemies come in a decent variety and you'll fight the small ones, big and beefier ones, and the annoying fast moving ones. All in all, the combat can get pretty intense at times. There are also boss battles and most of them are well done with a few of them having certain gimmicks, but the game never gives you specific tools to fight bosses and leaves up to you to figure out the best strategy for them. [h1]🎶An amazing soundtrack by Joel Corelitz[/h1] Just like any story-driven game, Eastward features a great soundtrack library. The music from the game adds much to the current events of the game and enhances its atmosphere to a greater degree. Many of the tracks are instrumental in nature, but there's the occasional tune reminiscent of the 8-bit era which, thanks to the ambiance of the game, doesn't feel out of place. [h1]🌠Play it again, Sam (and John)[/h1] After you beat the game once you'll gain access to a "Select Chapter" option which amounts to a New Game Plus, allowing you to restart any chapters you desire. This alone can increase the replayability of the game by a good amount. But some may ask: "What's the point of playing it again?" Maybe to get a chance to replay a part of the game you liked one more time, rewatch a cutscene you wanted again, or fight a boss you liked once more. Or maybe to find those treasure chests you may have missed in your first playthrough. The interesting part about the Select Chapter is the amount of options given to you: the game allows you to keep your progression (Health and Upgrades), start with a pregenerated save, or start without upgrades. Games featuring New Game Plus are increasingly rare nowadays, so having one that does it, and does it in such a thoughtful way, is a big plus. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2787167677 [h1]💦Shortcomings:[/h1] Even though it's a good game, this title has some problems in certain areas. The story the game tells is fairly predictable and it doesn't have many surprising twists which, for a game that puts such heavy focus on them, is a bit of a let-down. For every moment that you play it's easy to guess what the outcome of a plotline will be or even what will happen to some characters (although the game did shock me more than once). There's also the feeling that some characters are not fully explored or could've been made more important, held more weight to the story while other characters seemingly have important roles, but end up contributing very little to the plot overall. Cutscenes sometimes drag on for a while at times, sometimes for too long, and at points where you might be raring to jump into action. There is no option to skip any cutscenes at all here. While the ambiance is done right, the dungeon design is always very simple, sometimes too simple. There are not many of them that require exploration and many of them are as linear as the game itself. Speaking of exploration, there is very little of it in the game which is sad, maybe even wasteful, given how well crafted and beautiful the world of Eastward feels. Puzzles are not the high point either and while there are good ones, especially towards the end, but for the most part they're very simple and never feel too challenging. Combat itself feels a bit too plain and basic. While John has a fairly decent arsenal at his disposal, Sam's is locked into a single ability as the others take a long time to recharge which makes you feel like you should use them as sparingly as possible. [h1]💭Final thoughts:[/h1] Eastward is a charming game and, although a bit rough around the edges in certain places, it never fails to do what it proposes to: it tells a good story, has fluid combat and nice puzzles going for it-- all with great graphics and a fantastic cast of characters. It's easy to see how much thought and care was put into this game and playing it was wonderful and memorable experience.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 16, 2021

  An action adventure game that ticks all the right boxes: warm heartfelt story with a balance of combat and puzzles, wonderful visuals and music, funny dialogues and characters. Eastward is a journey worth taking!
• gamedeal user

  Sep 21, 2021

  After beating this game, I give this a 7.5/10. Why not an 8, 9 or 10? Think of this game like a slightly under cooked cake. It looks great, smells great and tastes great, but when you bite into it, you can still feel the clumps of batter in your mouth. That's Eastward. The pacing of the story was okay, not bad by any means but it could've been better. I felt one of the early chapters was kind of pointless, where another early chapter that felt too short could've been more fleshed out to give the player sentimental value to some of the characters and environment. Characters didn't get the arcs they deserved. This game has many interesting and charming characters that make you smile whenever they're on screen yet they barely get any backstory to really make you feel attached. Combat is basic, but that's not really a problem as this is a very classic-zelda inspired game. Finally the ending of this game just left me with unanswered questions and even more questions which kind of pissed me off. I feel like Eastward needed a bit more time in the oven to fix its writing, as the overall story is okay but it had so much potential which is really frustrating. Despite all that, for what it is, it's price and the quality you're getting, this game definitely didn't feel like a waste of my time. The art is astounding, the humor is charming, the soundtrack has some bangers and the overall story is pretty good. Eastward isn't perfect but for it's price I definitely recommend this game.