All style, no substance, I want to care for the protags, the kid is charming and her dialogues are fun, but WHY MAKE THE GUY YOU CONTROL SO BORING, how am I supposed to care about him when he's such a blank slate, even the traits other characters comment about him are extremely basic, he's a good cook, he's brave and... what else? you see almost nothing about his past and he's completely unfazed by anything that happens and the funny thing is that YOU CAN make a silent character show some emotions, see Mother 3 for example, when Flint is told that his wife died, he's enraged and you SEE him thrashing everything on his path, give me something so that I can believe this guy cares about anything.
Unfortunately, the rest of the characters don't get a better treatment with the exception of William you have to assume that everyone else is ok (the people on the underground, the people on the city, Isabel, etc) because after the antagonist is defeated you don't see them in a epilogue or anything
The gameplay is fine, nothing impressive but it's not bad either, can't really say I got bored with it but besides unlocking new weapons every now and then, most of the time you'll use the default one
The artstyle is gorgeous at least, it makes you wish the rest of the game had this much care put into.
Finally the story and the world is barebones, for a story about a world destroyed by a catastrophe, you don't see much of it, 3 major cities and a few places here and there, not much is explained about the world besides the info dump almost at the end of the game
Honestly, what a shame, I wishlisted this game back in the day when it was announced and I saw promise. Recently with this new DLC, judging from the steam description and the trailer, I don't think I'm going to bother with it anymore, I wish the best for the devs but this isn't for me

Aventura bastante divertida estilo pixel, y con un minijuego que engancha bastante.

La historia es entretenida, y algún punto se torna algo oscura. Ojalá una parte 2 que expliquen mejor algunas cosas.

Es un juego de aventuras donde irás turnando entre dos personajes. Jhon y Sam, cada uno con su jugabilidad, que tendrás que usar para avanzar.

I bought this game on a whim to use up my Gold Points before they expired based on the cover. I do not regret it.

Eastward is a story focused action adventure game in the style of old Zelda games with an art style inspired by Mother 3. The combat is ehh, left to be desired, partially because this game lags on the switch and partially because some enemies will just stick to you. A minor annoyance, nothing more than that. The shining star of the game is the story. Act 1 is predictable but for good reason, Act 2 is boring but for good reason, and Act 3 is where it all pays off. Most people I talked to about Eastward dropped it around Act 2, Act 2 is where the game sticks in one area for a majority of the game. You are there to get immersed, live with the city folk, and absorb the atmosphere. It's worth it, I promise.

Good game, definitely recommend.

P.S. This game is surprisingly raunchy and kinda vulgar even though the game looks very friendly. For example, there is a merchant that is a repurposed sex machine and whenever you complete a transaction, the display on the machine plays an animation of a woman climaxing. It's not graphic or anything...that's just what happens...

Eastward es un indie con el que es probablemente el pixelart más bonito que he visto. Visualmente es un escándalo, con detalles, animaciones y sprites de una calidad excelente de principio a fin. Una delicia visual que va acompañada de una banda sonora inspirada en los juegos retro de los 90 y que encaja a la perfección con las dinámicas del juego. El diseño del mundo me parece muy original y te invita a seguir explorando. La historia, desgraciadamente, no va de la mano. La premisa es interesante pero la trama se desarrolla de una forma excesivamente lenta y algunos momentos se hacen pesados. Eso sí, la mayoría de los personajes son carismáticos y bastante memorables. La jugabilidad tampoco es su punto fuerte, basándose en la resolución de mazmorras (tipo Zelda) y, aunque es entretenida, peca de demasiado simple, sin contar que para mi los combates tienen problemas de diseño a la hora de enfrentarse a enemigos. El juego de Earthborn tampoco me ha gustado. Como conclusión, el juego posee una bonita portada pero un fondo mejorable, pero al finalizarlo tras 20 horas de juego debo reconocer que he disfrutado del viaje. Recomendado para quienes quieran maravillarse de un apartado visual excepcional y un viaje entretenido. 7,9/10 (03/2024)

Maybe the single biggest disappointment I had in 2021. I'd been excited about this game for literal years before it came out and forced myself to play through the entire thing - hoping it would get better. The visuals are outstanding but the gameplay is... flat? The puzzles are fine, the action RPG gameplay is dollar-store Zelda, and the story fails to live up to its billing. I also got mad that we spent an absurd amount of time in one setting after the game set up that this is a road trip narrative.

I will support the studio's next endeavor, but I hope that they spend as much time thinking about the systems and plot for that game as they clearly did on the visuals and aesthetic (again, they're amazing)

Man, I love this game. It turned me into a pixel art lover!
I loved every aspect of this game except for some minor issues, the character's design, the sometimes goofy, sometimes serious dialogue, the pixel art, and the gameplay.
You will be John who lives in a city called Potcrock isle, deep underground, built to escape the apocalypse. Our story starts many years after the apocalypse. He meets a strange girl named Sam on one of his trips to the mines and decides to adopt her, but strangely she has some mystery powers, so a mix of wanting to explore the outside world and to find out what is so special about Sam is the core of the first act of the story.

The gameplay is extremely fun and they always throw a new Idea for you to play with, at first you play with a pan as your weapon, but as you progress more, they will introduce new weapons, new enemies, new puzzles and much more. As for me, I loved it and never felt bored except for the times they overdid it, For example, before you enter a boss room, for instance, they make you go three routes to power up some generator and it gets stile after the fourth or fifth time.

The characters and the places you go to in the adventure are always cool, a village using old boats as houses, a city built on a dam, or the starting city, Potcrock Isle. all of them are unique and Man, they are beautiful!
you will meet all sorts of people in your adventure and ALL of them have a unique look and personality, you have Jasper the silly clown, Sam the cheerful child, Captain Pam with his pirate lingo and bright nature, Alva the scientist/princess, Isabela, the adventurer and the knight of the princess, and many MANY more.

Don't get me started on the art because they nailed every aspect of it, and dare, I say the best pixel art game I've ever played! every city has an identity, every place is special. I can not praise it enough.

Now the music is very well handled especially with the cooking mechanic, but I feel like they have been reused A LOT, they are wonderful don't get me wrong, great to hear but if I hear the same boss music ever again...
Anyway, the music is good.

it took me around 30 hours to beat it because I went everywhere twice and almost finished the game inside of the game, oh yeah, didn't I mention that? They made a full-fledged game inside of the game It's crazy! but you could easily finish it in 15 hours or even less.

I didn't understand the story much, but I just fully embraced the vibes of the story and that's it.

Idc when it was published it's my game of the year for now, I can easily give it 9.5/10 loved it

I hate to abandon games, especially this one but...
I so badly wanted to love this game. The art style, the humor and the gameplay all seemed perfect to me. This game looked like it was made for me. I first played this towards the end of last year and for the most part I was enjoying it but then I played it more..
As I write this review I have 17 hours into it. In the nicest way possible this game is SO boring... (storywise). My favorite parts about this game is exploring, the combat and the puzzles. I could literally care less about the story unfortunately. I didn't see this game as anything longer than like.. 8 hours, and me being at 17 hours and barely being halfway.. this game is a slog. It has too much for what it is. Filler areas that the game can do without, all these characters and such that don't give an emotional pull.. Thank god that this game has a fast forward button and you can pretty much skip all dialogue. It's unfortunate because this game is absolutely beautiful, stunning even, but lacks in so many ways. When it comes to music, it's terrible and very annoying. I swear there's like only 4 songs and they play over and over and over to where I had to eventually play the game on mute. The music just fills me with rage I don't know why LOL.
Also.. this game kinda runs bad. I don't know if me playing on switch has anything to do with it but the game stutters from time to time and there's input lag..? You'll be walking around and the game skips like a scratched dvd or something, it's weird.
The pluses about this game are the bosses, they're actually a challenge and it's rewarding when you defeat them. The pixel art is gorgeous, very reminiscent of the Mother series and I love that. Anything other than combat/artstyle is really a hit or miss with this game AND there's dlc that I'm not gonna check out even though it's just like a farming sim? I don't know..
I don't find myself picking this game back up because I genuinely was not having fun, it feels like a huge chore to get through which is not what I was expecting. Not the worst, it's just so mediocre that even ragging on this game makes me feel bad.

I bought this game based purely on the art style and I absolutely don't regret my decision! I was really invested in this game, I finished it in a week!

Eastward is an action adventure RPG. You play a father, John, and his adoptive daughter Sam. John is the one you will be playing the most, since it's him that has the ability to attack, with guns, bombs or in melee combat with a frying pan. Sam on the other hand uses magic to freeze enemies. Gameplay alternates between exploration-combat and puzzle solving, using the abilities of the 2 characters.

Like I said, I picked up this game because of it's art style and omg it's beautiful!!
The game is in pixel art, but a very detailed kind of pixel art. Characters are very expressive and over animated, backgrounds are filled with details everywhere and the colors are very soft to the eyes.
I really dig this kind of pixel art, but what makes this game even more beautiful is it's effects! The game may look and play like a 2D game, but it is actually running in 3D. This allowed the devs to create impressive light / shadow VFXs. Every sprite in the game reacts to light sources and can receive shadows according to the general shape it should have. For exemple, when trees cast a shadow on top of a train, the shadow isn't the same on the side and on the top of the train, because the surface isn't inclined the same way. This creates a great sense of depth while keeping the 2D pixel art look intact and I am really impressed by this technique!

This game is a RPG, so its story and setting are very important. And wow, once again, I was amazed by the beauty and creativity put in the environments you traverse. The story is set in a post-apocaliptycal world, where humanity is doomed by a mysterious miasm that kills everyone it touches. But post-apocaliptycal doesn't mean dark and muddy, quite the contrary in fact! The world of Eastward is very natural, with a lot of vibrant colors and filled wih strange structures and creatures. Characters all have A LOT of charm and the general mood of the game is pretty upbeat. This contrast between the looks and the real nature of the world makes the tragic events all the more impactful and brutal.
Pacing is also really good, with a great mix of action, exploration, puzzle solving and story progression. There is only one chapter that felt a bit too long, because you are stuck in a time loop, seeing the same cutscenes over and over and with pratically nothing but walking and talking to NPCs between the cutscenes.

I won't say I understood all of the plot, because I didn't (there is quite a lot of things happening at the end), but I really enjoyed my adventure alongside John and Sam. The duo really feels complementary, both in story and in gameplay! The perpetual flee in a train going toward east is a great concept, and it is well executed.
There are some strange decision here and there, like wanting to have a playable character that never talks or express anything begin to show regrets and trauma, but nothing breaking the immersion.

For at least half of the game, I was thinking that audio was the weakest part of the game. But after finishing it, I'm not as sure about that. Audio in the game definetly feels a bit weak, even more so in epic or dramatic scenes, but I think the problem mostly comes from SFXs and not from the music.
There are a lot of tracks in the game, but I had a feeling of constantly hearing the same ones in every cutscenes. BUT, it may be because I played the whole game in 5 or 6 long sessions :'). The intro and final chapter also contains some really good chiptune bangers!
And by the way I think I'm being picky: bear in mind that while I said that audio is the weakest part of the game, the rest is absolutely amazing, so it's not really that bad.

There is one final thing I would like to applaud: accessibility!
This game is pretty easy if you use all the tools at your disposal, but remain challenging for all players depending on how they choose to play. If you decide to invest a little bit of time in cooking, you can create food that heals + buff your attack or defense for 1-2 minutes. You can also buy refill items that you can use to completely refill your ammo at any time.
When exploring, if you don't like fighting you can also choose to evade monsters and don't deal with them. And during bosses, you can either try to optimize and hit the boss while it attacks you, or you can focus on evasion and you will always get a large window where the boss just lets you damage it.
I think that the game can adapt itself to a large variety of play style and skills and this is a good thing! It allows people not very experienced with action games to enjoy the story without feeling frustrated, and other players will not feel the need to abuse this because the fights are fun and engaging.
There is one boss that doesn't follow this rule. It requires to do perfectely timed parries. But the timing windows are very generous and the fight comes very late in the game, so I think even less experienced players can beat it, maybe with a couple tries.

All in all, I loved this game! It's cute, it's beautiful, it's fun, it's exciting! A perfect introduction to RPGs, without the boring Excel stats and complicated turn-based gameplay or combo systems!

While I had my Xbox controller out and the PC all ready to play games, I figured I may as well keep on chugging away at PC games that I've been meaning to play for ages. Eastward is a game my partner got me on Steam a good few months back, so it's been one I've been meaning to play for quite some time. I'd only ever heard good things about it, and though I wasn't super familiar with it, from what little I did know, it seemed right up my alley. It took me around 23 or so hours to beat the English version of the game while doing as many side quests and such as I can.

Eastward is the story of John, a miner living in the underground town of Potcrock Isle, who one day finds a little girl underground. Taking on the name Sam, this strange, white haired girl who he found in a strange yellow pod underground quickly becomes close to John, and they spend their days at the mines as John works out a meager living for the two of them. However, Sam's adventurous spirit combined with the turning hand of fate quickly make things difficult for the two of them, and they're forced to journey, as the title says, Eastward, for better or worse.

Eastward was a game I absolutely bunched in with games like Undertale or Omori (two games, mind you, I haven't played) when it came out. It wears its inspirations on its sleeves, and the Mother/Earthbound series is very transparently one of them (to the point there's even a game-within-the-game called "Earth Born" that you can play). However, unlike many other Earthbound-inspired games, Eastward shares its genre with its other big inspiration, The Legend of Zelda, and with its other main inspirations very clearly being Japanese anime like Studio Ghibli films (as if the extremely obvious Hayao Miyazaki didn't make that clear enough), it certainly sets a quite high bar for itself both narratively and mechanically.

Narratively, unquestionably so, I'd say it really lives up to the task it sets out for itself. Where something like the Mother series often uses a tale of growing up to communicate about the main themes of the respective title, Eastward uses being aged to do that. Honestly, I'd say the Studio Ghibli inspirations feel a lot stronger than the Mother/Earthbound inspirations in this regard, since the overall messaging and themes veer more towards contemplations on daily (especially family) life rather than the larger philosophical themes that Shigesato Itoi's works usually focus on. Eastward's main themes of responsibility and guardianship really impressed me. There's so much care and attention focused around the the different aspects of leadership and adult life (whether it's being the head of a settlement, a loving partner, or a parent to a child), it weaves a nuanced and heartfelt story masterfully. It's a story that's not afraid to get dark, but it's also a story that is never needlessly cruel or gratuitous, and that's something else I really appreciated it for. Eastward is easily one of the best written games I've ever played, and it's definitely one of my new favorite stories in media, hands down.

While the narrative of Eastward may be more in the vein of a Studio Ghibli film, the gameplay is unquestionably more along the lines of The Legend of Zelda. It's a top-down 2D action/adventure game where you go through dungeons, solve puzzles, do sidequests, talk to townsfolk, all that good stuff. That said, given that this is a more linear game where backtracking to old areas is generally impossible, I suppose you could say it has more in common with games like Illusion of Gaia than Link to the Past. As a big fan of these types of action/adventure games, I found this to be a really fun one! The dungeon and boss design is really good, and the pacing of the story vs. action segments is also handled very well. There's a fair bit of side content to involve yourself with as well, and you very well might want to, because this is honestly a pretty tough game quite frequently.

You can swap between John and Sam on the fly most of the time, and you can even split them up to operate them independently for puzzle solving. Sam has some attacks, but her main arsenal is a ranged stun move. John is your main pummeler and dispatcher of baddies, and his melee attack of a pan combined with the several guns you get over the course of the game will be how most bosses and such are fought. Rushing blindly forward into battle is often not the best course of action, however. John will step forward with each pan strike, which will usually stunlock most lone enemies, but it's not very helpful for fighting groups. Using Sam to stun enemies as well as dealing out your ammo (your guns all draw from the same pool) and bombs wisely is the key to surviving combats well, and the large enemy variety and well designed bosses make combat always something that's fun, even when it's hard. The game even has a very clearly Breath of the Wild-inspired cooking mechanic to top it all off, so you can always sure up your health bar with big healing items should you need to. On the whole, Eastward's mechanical design is just as well thought out as its narrative design, and that is to say: absolutely excellent.

Aesthetically, Eastward is part of the modern trend of pixel-art indie games, but it's a very nice looking one of those. The music is fantastic and compliments each area and scene very nicely. The pixel art is also beautiful, and the enemy and especially NPC design is done so well that it brings each area to life in a way that feels different from the last. So many small touches and flourishes to each NPC, especially Sam, had be grinning ear to ear more times than I can count in just how well they add character and voice to a game with no voice acting. To that point, the localization in this game is REALLY well done. I honestly never would've guessed this game wasn't written originally in English with just how well done the dialogue writing is, and this Shanghai-based indie studio could frankly teach a lot of AAA publishers a thing or two with just how much care and attention can really bring a game to life in a new language.

I'll finish this review off with talking about the game-within-a-game, Earth Born. Rather than being some tacked on little mini-game, Earth Born is a properly fleshed out little game (as well as a not super subtle framing device for the rest of the game), and a really competently put together little rogue-lite RPG. This is where the Earthbound-inspired mechanical design is, and you, the knight, have 7 days to train up, get equipped, and assemble a party before the demon lord's ritual is complete. It's a pretty involved little game, and you could easily spend a ton of time learning its ins and outs and optimizing routes if you were so inclined. You can also get little in-game amiibo-type things in Eastward to use as extra items in Earth Born if things get too tough (and I know I needed them), but you thankfully never actually have to play Earth Born for any real period of time. I played it once and got lucky enough to get the normal ending in it (but good gods was it close), and that single full playthrough took me almost an hour! With how good Eastward already is, Earth Born is just icing on the cake and one more thing to get invested in if you're so inclined~.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is the 3rd year in a row that I've ended up playing something very early in the year that becomes an all-time favorite game. Two years ago it was Dandy Dungeon, last year it was Disco Elysium, and this year it's Eastward. Eastward is a master craft of storytelling and an excellently put together action/adventure games that's absolutely deserving of standing tall amongst its inspirations. Not many dev teams could've put together something that works this well, but these folks have managed it, and I'm super excited for whatever it is they put out next. If a bit of difficulty doesn't turn you off to it, this is one you definitely don't wanna miss out on if you're at all into quality story telling in games or 2D Zelda-likes because it's one of the best non-rogue-like indie games out there right now, as far as I'm concerned.

Muy buen indie con claras inspiraciones en Mother 3 y con graficos a los de gba.

La historia si bien arranca muy lenta, a medida que vas avanzando se va acelerando y entra a ponerse a mi gusto muy interesante. Puede ser un punto muy a favor o en contra el tipo de historia ya que no a todos les puede llamar la atencion el tipo de desarrollo que tiene.

Ame que tenga un sidegame directamente inspirado en dragon quest 3, la verdad que no me lo esperaba y lo ame por eso.

Este año agregaron un dlc muy baarto que añade un farm simulator y la verdad que esta muy adictivo y es bastante comfy.

Visualmente un despelote, se fueron muy para arriba con este nivel de sprites y son de lo mejor que he visto en un indie.

En switch tiene leves caidas de fps por alguna razon pero nada de otro mundo.

La musica tambien es muy buena y recuerda mucho a los mother.

El gameplay es el de un arpg onda los zeldas de nes y snes, y si bien es muy simple se le agradece. Tiene varias armas para elegir de corto y largo alcance para poder usar.

Y por ultimo decir que hay bastante puzzles interesantes que a veces requiere de usar a ambos pjs principales.