Eastward Review – IGN

A man and his adopted daughter find their way through a whimsical, post-apocalyptic landscape. With the frying pan and psychic powers ready, they might stumble to save the world as they explore it. With all the styles of a retro JRPG, you’d expect Eastward to play as one, but this chilling action adventure is more Zelda than Dragon Quest. John and Sam’s triumphs and mistakes take place in an enchanting pixel art landscape that is rich with charming characters and intimately designed locations. Even where the story dragged on for a while, or the simplicity of the challenges felt patronizing, the parts of Eastward that spoke to me more than made up for it.

Our headliners are John, a silent protagonist wrapped in messy hair and a bushy beard, and Sam, a scandalously precocious girl with budding psychic powers and a penchant for getting them into trouble. They are lovable characters with a great personality and a kind of timeless appeal. They left home under dubious circumstances and eventually find their way … to the east. I loved switching between the two as they travel through a cute but dangerous apocalyptic world of small towns and dams. Along the way, you play through low-key story chapters and explore the stories of the people you meet. There are many much – of silly little minigames along the way. Baseball, river rafting, slot machines, and ubiquitous cuisine.

The walk to the east is fairly linear, but the areas you explore are designed like little dungeons, with winding paths to find your way while fighting silly monsters and solving simple puzzles. John does most of the fighting through simple but satisfying hack and slash action, but Sam’s powers, such as freezing enemies within large psychic bubbles, are useful for fights and vital for puzzles.

It took me a little over 30 hours to complete the main quest, but I know there are secrets to explore and little NPC stories that I missed and are worth going back to. In fact, Eastward’s overall story is good enough to wisely avoid spoilers in this review, to the point of being too vague at some points, but trust me, that’s to your advantage. There’s also a fairly detailed JRPG roguelite game within the game, called Earth Born, to play, and it was fun enough to spend an additional six hours on it.

Eastward’s real draw is its world. The vibrant pixel art landscapes are so creative and so full of detail that I would often stop to look at a city street or a new train station. Much of it is alive with little animations like running water, gleaming metal, or spinning fans. I loved details like the dirty laundry on the lines between buildings, the boats overturned and turned into houses, and the countryside in the distance from the train windows.

It’s a loving rendition of a world that sits somewhere between a Studio Ghibli movie and a classic JRPG – Castle in the Sky meets EarthBound. The whole thing is layered with a rather low-key soundtrack that isn’t outstanding at all, but is good enough, with a variety of both instrumental and chiptune arrangements.

However, it’s not just the funds that stand out. Eastward’s characters have great sprites and animations that have a lot of personality. They are a well-designed cast of weirdos that have something unique going for them, which is an animated style that has gotten way too weird. The styles and personalities of the people you meet differ wildly, from tough ranch laborers to a trio of lively aunts, a sleepy little town mayor, or a cigar-smoking casino owner. Not to mention circus performers, train drivers, con artists, and funky robots. (My favorite robot runs a construction company and has hip problems.)

Little search quests make you run from one side of the world to the other, but that’s not so bad when that world is pretty. Much of the best that Eastward has to offer is simply smiling at the guy meditating on a roof as you pass through his part of town. I’ve been through it a dozen times already; What are you doing up there? I do not know. He’s happy. The guy is vibrating and he’s nice.

It’s a relief that the world is so attractive and the characters so attractive, because Eastward’s greatest weakness is his writing. The character dialogue is hit or miss, with more than a few cliche lines and actual stinky ones. I mean the non-ironic use of lines like “I’ve been running my whole life.” Frankly, it’s because writing doesn’t know when to step back and let action or movement convey words. Use two sentences when one would or, more often, one sentence when neither would. The dialog that should appear in the background (laughs, exclamations) is usually a bubble that requires a button to progress. The only time I felt impatient or bored with Eastward was during the endless dialogues.

The exploration and combat are a welcome break from all that watching and reading. The fights are simple and most enemies can be easily defeated with a judicious application of John’s pan. Everything else is susceptible to the neon colored shotgun or flamethrower. However, there are plenty of weird foes, such as a giant frog person, tentacle plants, or ultra-tough zombies, and they all have their own attack pattern, but he generally took them down in the same way, no matter what they were. But let me be clear: simple is not always bad. It was fun dodging the attacks, hitting the mutants with a frying pan, and blowing them up with the shotgun.

It’s weird that while you switch Sam quite frequently to do puzzles, I rarely felt the need to use her in combat; her ability to put monsters in frozen bubbles is useful for some things, but you don’t absolutely need it to win. If you had a psychic partner, wouldn’t you want her to do a little more?

Screenshots from Eastward Review

Likewise, it’s a bit disappointing that the puzzles Sam’s instrument solves are never too complex, they only get difficult when it comes to a time or skill challenge, or to get to some tricky hidden chests. Most of the time, you will have to notice something like a wall to knock down with a bomb, a puzzle of what cables to connect or what obstacles to remove so that a raft floats where you want it. The most difficult puzzles will have a timing element: move quickly after flipping a switch or throwing a golf bomb into a narrow opening from a moving platform. They are not complex things.

Simplicity bothered me sometimes. While some parts of the fight are good in their simplicity, others are just basic. In part, it’s because single-joystick controls feel inadequate for aiming weapons. It’s fun to hit with a pan, not so much fun to make sure the characters are dodging the incoming projectiles.

The relatively infrequent boss fights and minigames are an exception there, requiring a bit of finesse and switching between John’s weapons and Sam’s powers. I liked them a lot more than the platforms and puzzles, and many of them really tested my ability to use all the tools in my arsenal to achieve a clean victory. One in particular stands out, an enemy drops bombs that you try to place in a vulnerable spot. To win, he needed a deft hand to drop bombs like John, then switch Sam to use his powers to distract the enemy, then go back to John to deal the damage after the bomb exploded. That’s the kind of synergy Eastward’s combat needs the most.