slog away at eastward review

src/games/🚧eastward.md

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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.
+
+### 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 also 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 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.
+
+### gameplay
+
+### 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.
+
+### 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 experienced. it's unfortunate that a lot of the story and structure didnt quite land for me, but like with jrr tolkien, some people are excellent worldbuilders and just good story writers; it's unfortunately pretty difficult to publish a world with no story to experience in it.
+
 - aesthetic
 - music
 - story