---
title: eastward
date: 2023-07-10
---

⚠️ i'm spoiling this bitch! don't read if you intend to play it! ⚠️

also! i got all the images for this post from [rpgfan](https://www.rpgfan.com/gallery/eastward-screenshots/) which is really nice because i did _not_ want to go and replay a bunch of it just to get pretty pictures

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i bought eastward within a couple of days of release (16th september 2021), and i finally finished it at the start of july. i think that says a lot about both the flaws and strengths the game might have; the story is overall plagued by weird pacing (although i think it might be somewhat intentional), but it has enough going for it to drag me back in and finally finish it ten months later.

big elements of the games story are key to the experience as a whole, so i'm just going to slap this whole thing with a big spoiler warning. my short thoughts are that eastward is one of the best looking games that i have ever played, and the whole experience is only marred by a story that is paced a little weirdly and is sometimes a bit difficult to get your head around. well worth a look!

<a href="https://www.rpgfan.com/gallery/eastward-screenshots/#envira-gallery-image-190148">
    <img src="https://www.rpgfan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Eastward-Screenshot-011.jpg" onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='/_assets/img/eastward/000.jpg'">
</a>

### feel
the _feel_ of eastward hits you immediately, and there's a good chance that you bought it because of the _feel_ you got from trailers and clips and screenshots. the world is insanely detailed with potentially the best spritework that i have ever seen. there is very little in the way of reused assets except where it makes sense to do so (furniture and combat related items crop up repeatedly, but i can happily give that a pass). every single building is unique with its own structure, history, greebles and crumbling advertisements. everything was hand designed by some of the most talented environment designers i have had the pleasure of witnessing. 

the sprite format also works perfectly for this effect, by limiting the amount of detail you can expect to see. this would be much harder to pull off in a 3d engine with realistic assets. when you only have to draw junk and construction debris up to a pixel scale, you can focus on squeezing everything out of a location without fear of not being detailed _enough_.

these worlds are absolutely filled with people, and no side characters are alike. regular humans, weird mutants and robots all coexist, and while a lot of the dialogue for a lot of them is pretty standard rpg fare, they help sell the feel of an area by giving you a slice of what pepole are thinking about their situation. nothing groundbreaking, to be sure, but not hearing it from a cookiecutter model that has been used multiple times in one area, makes it feel like it's coming from an actual person with actual opinions.

the game's structure also does a stellar job of reinforcing the world itself. while the stop and start pacing does feel very odd and definitely made me lose interest once or twice, it gives you an overall feeling of uncertainty; this place might be really nice, but there is a feeling in the back of your mind that something might go horribly wrong at any moment. potcrock isle sounds like somewhere you should be in and out of in thirty minutes but you actually spend quite a bit of time there. greenberg is unbelievably homely but its a fraction of the amount of time before you're forced to leave. you're in new dam city for so long that it feels like this might be it, and it becomes hard to imagine where else you would even go.

the music of the game is lovely, although i'm hesitant to talk about it much after hearing it quite as much as i did. most of the tracks are under two minutes and can loop multiple times through the games long dialogue and exploration scenes. that whinging aside, the music is a perfect fit for the earthbound nostalgia that the game is playing with and i enjoyed it immensely.

<a href="https://www.rpgfan.com/gallery/eastward-screenshots/#envira-gallery-image-71704">
    <img src="https://www.rpgfan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Eastward-Screenshot-008.jpg" onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='/_assets/img/eastward/001.jpg'">
</a>

### gameplay
when it comes to actually _playing_ the game, the experience is fairly neatly split into combat and exploration. the latter largely covers the time you'll spend in town talking to people, doing small tasks, looking for little side objectives, moving the story along and preparing for upcoming combat. this includes the game's cooking minigame which i see as a deeply iconic and core experience that sets eastward apart from a lot of similar experiences. the cooking itself is fairly simple and very reminiscent of something like breath of the wild: combine three ingredients and an optional spice, try to score a big number on the cooking slots, and then watch a little animation to receive your final dish. ingredients fit into groups (meat, fish, dairy and eggs, fruit, vegetables) which are used to determine about half of the recipes, but more specific ingredient combinations can give you more specific outputs, like pizza, pumpkin soup or takoyaki. the cooking element pulls triple duty, as a way to give yourself healing and buffs during combat, an action that links directly to john's character of being caring and loving, and for making ingredients a surprisingly compelling reward in the combat-based areas of the game. 

speaking of combat, eastward provides a fun experience of hacking your way through the wilds to whatever character or mcguffin you need to find to keep the story moving. john is permanently equipped with his frying pan as a short range melee weapon, which has a slow and weighty swing with a bit of knockback, and which gets upgraded throughout the game at key plot points. to my pure delight, each visual change to the frying pan is mirrored in the cooking animation, an attention to detail that i hadn't expected to see. there are also three guns which didn't get _heaps_ of use in my playthrough: a short range shotgun, a short to medium range flamethrower, and a long range sawblade gun. ammo is fairly limited and i found that good placement with the frying pan with its knockback effect made it an easier weapon to use most of the time, even if the damage was maybe a quarter of what the guns provide. 

the guns (and bombs) are also used during environmental puzzles, which i found were balanced to be just long enough to not be fatiguing. they're not desperately complicated, but they're also not pokemon-level simple, and some of the latter ones required me to take a couple of goes to get through. for a story based game, not halting the flow for too long is pretty key, and i reckon they nailed it just about perfect. 

that covers the majority of gameplay elements! i also thought it worth mentioning that enemy variety is solid, both visually and mechanically, and bosses were also quite fun looking, even if most of them could be completed first go. overall, a really good match for the story the game wanted to tell.

<a href="https://www.rpgfan.com/gallery/eastward-screenshots/#envira-gallery-image-190157">
    <img src="https://www.rpgfan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Eastward-Screenshot-020.jpg" onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='/_assets/img/eastward/003.jpg'">
</a>

### story
i'm really not 100% sure with the story of this game. i felt myself wondering what the point of it was; you don't get that with a final fantasy, for example, because the point is to trust in your friends, stand up for what you believe in, and kill the big monster that is threatening the world etc etc. eastward has all these things, but the courage of the characters is never called into question and is more a bigone conclusion, which leaves any player with a bit of media literacy asking what the experience is trying to _tell_ you. quickly changing settings with a varied cast of characters also sets off my metaphor-meter, even though i don't think there was really meant to be any. while i think i did come to a satisfying conclusion after a little bit of googling (which i will discuss throughout this section, so spoiler alert) i decided that i didn't really care about that, because the dynamic of the main characters is what kept me going.

anyone who has any proximity to videogames in the last ten years or hbo in the last seven months is familiar with the father-child dynamic that has cropped up in telltale's the walking dead, the last of us, 2018s god of war etcetera, etcetera. you take a gruff middleaged man with some kind of trauma and dark past, you stick him in with an impressionable child to form a parental bond, and then you pull out his demons to mess with the whole deal and make some sweeping statement out people being unable to change or forcing their expectations on others or something. eastward is nice because it's the story of a kind man who brings a kid up right and cares deeply for her, and a kid who cares for him back. there's hints throughout that he's got some other stuff going on, and the game explores him wanting to settle down with uva (although i have heard some interesting thoughts about the greenberg people actually being aware of the human harvest, hence their insistence on getting the two of them together asap), but the dynamic is extremely positive to the end. some theories posit that sam was actually put in potcrock isle to experience the worst of the world, but john's love kept her from being jaded about humanity, and set the whole game in motion. 

sam's saccharine perspective stems from this relationship; because she isn't jaded she loves to meet new people and approaches the world from an extremely positive place; she befriends the gruff and shady lee, a character who everyone in new dam city sees as cold hearted (and frankly, might still be). this positivity is mirrored by the bright and cheery aesthetic to create an angle on the post-apocalypse that i'd never seen before, and also gives incredible contrast when the more serious moments come to the story. i think this veil is unfortunately broken completely at the end of new dam city, where alva and isabelle disappear and the fate of the people seems shakey; i think that monkhollywood and the lovely ester city are attempts to get you back into a positive vibe to pull the rug out again, but we've been hurt one too many times at this point and the impact was lessended for me.

i was also largely lost by the time travel, the significance of solomon, and the whole ending. i like to the think the end-end is the result of sam's rebirth after joining with mother; she's come back to the world somehow and stumbled on to an older john who has been making it without her. i thing it's meant to represent the end of the cycles caused by mother, but it could just as easily be interpreted as just another one. i feel like we're a bit inundated with time travel and multiverse stories these days, and i honestly would have liked to see the story explored without it; this was my issue with 13 sentinels as well, where too many twists are layered on top of each other and they lose all their punch. at least they didn't pull an "it was all a simulation" one at the end. boom! spoiler in a spoiler.

<a href="https://www.rpgfan.com/gallery/eastward-screenshots/#envira-gallery-image-71705">
    <img src="https://www.rpgfan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Eastward-Screenshot-009.jpg" onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='/_assets/img/eastward/003.jpg'">
</a>

### finally
i think that eastward is truly one of the prettiest games i have ever seen, with one of the most charming worlds i have ever set foot in. i think the conclusion unfortunately let the game down a little, but i loved the story itself and the wholistic experience of the setting that comes from the characters and plots within it.