hypothetical life partner walks into the room

"Vee, what are you doing?"

"Playing Balatro."

"It's 4 o'clock in the morning. Why on Earth are you playing Balatro?"

"Because I've lost control of my life."

Eastward, or "Eastbound" as it really should have been called, is so gosh darn pretty. It just looks real nice. It has a unique, detailed look. It feels alive, it moves, you might say it breathes, even. It has some frame drops on Switch here and there, but it is in the whole a visual treat all the way through. The music is pretty good, and the character arcs are nice enough. Unfortunately, the game suffers throughout from a pretty bad sense of pacing and overall odd or incoherent moods.

Eastbound takes a lot of inspiration from the Mother series, a series of JRPGs from the late 90s and early 200s. There's a pretty fun mini game based on classic JRPGs in Eastbound, and some important characters are referred to as "Mother" in the game. Eastbound also takes inspiration from these games by making you spend hours doing gopher tasks that don't really progress the story at all, and having a story that seems like it was only translated halfway. There were far too many moments where a serious plot point--a character death, or several character deaths--would get undercut by the cheery music cue and a change in topic. It seemed like the dissonance was intentional at first, maybe, but it never developed. I don't know.

I think if you really dig the story this game would be fun. I liked the characters well enough, and the gameplay was fine, it all just too way too long. And in the end it didn't really feel worth it. Still it looks nice, and gives very strong Miyazaki vibes. Or perhaps shitty Miyazaki ripoff vibes.

I’m overwhelmingly glad that I stuck with this game through to the end, because I very nearly didn’t. True to what other people have said - Eastward is glacial; largely disinterested with stringing the player along with explosive story beats, overarching goals and villains. While the game shares many similarities to Zelda: Minish Cap and Mother 3 in its aesthetics, dungeon schema and quirky ensemble cast, it feels closer in spirit to Moon: Remix RPG. Eastward is primarily a story of a journey, a potpourri of emotions and vignettes, and it expects you to inhabit the communities of the microworlds you visit on your trip. I wish I had known this going in, and I’d like to start my review by stating as such as a primer for anyone reading because when I clocked what Eastward’s intentions were and met it halfway, I finally found myself sinking in.

Eastward is an adventure RPG revolving around the story of John, a stoic, taciturn miner and his mysterious wide-eyed adoptive daughter named Sam - each born into an isolated town deep beneath the surface. The narrative is ostensibly a one-way ticket on a train powered by Sam’s positive energy and curiosity as she yearns to see the sun for the first time with a thoroughly convincing and endearing childlike wonderment. Upon reaching the surface, I was right there with her.

The world is presented through the dichotomy of John and Sam’s polar opposite personalities. Sam is contagiously cheerful and childishly chatty, but she often fails to perceive the more adult dramas and contradictions. Despite John being ghoulishly silent throughout the game, he exhibits warmth and intelligence at points that the player can fill in themselves. This is particularly noticeable in moments like when Sam and John encounter incubators for artificial human beings hidden deep within ruins for the first time. For Sam, those seem almost like hyper-technological playgrounds, while for John, and consequently also for the player, their mysterious and threatening nature is very evident. It’s all surprisingly effective as far as Game Dad character interactions go.

Eastward is a post-apocalyptic setting fraught with danger, but dotted along the tracks are pockets of humanity small and large, towns and cities with cultures cultivated over time in isolation. Each is inhabited by characters that are of course quirky, but surprisingly fleshed out and genuinely memorable. It’s been a very long time since a game world has felt so alive and well-told down to its minute details, helped in no small part to the stellar pixel work in the meticulously realised characters and environments. Some of the best pixel art I have ever seen. Honestly, it left me genuinely inspired - to take in every inch of the world, but also to create for myself.

I often found myself thinking back to the steps on the path I had already walked, about the characters I could no longer return to, and wondering what they were doing while I was not there to watch. Personally speaking, I can ask nothing more of a game. Eastward acted as a beacon of positive vibrations and inspiration to me. As someone who has never grown out of pinning himself to a train window and imagining the lives of the people in the towns I zoom by, the experience of this game was incisive to something I hold dear. Favourite game of 2021 by far.

"𝙱𝚞𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚍ō" 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙽𝚎𝚘𝚙𝚘𝚜𝚝𝚖𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚖 █

The Cyberpunk franchise is a litmus test of our time. This groundbreaking video game puts on full display the entire spectrum of American society, masterfully pointing out the greatest problems of the neomodern era. Cyberpunk 2077 was, in its own way, a generational manifesto on the affirmation of living life. The use of vivid light and colors, shaky gameplay, ubiquitous blood effects and pervasive crash-to-desktop testifies to the extraordinary self-awareness of the studio director, who once revealed in an interview how he "fucking loves it when hot chicks dissect the shit out of the bad guys." Perhaps no other concept more aptly describes the underlying societal ethos when this game was released.

Especially worthy of note is the repetition in cutscenes of the rockerboy motif, through which the protagonist reinterprets their engrammed reality. One example of this convention's flawless implementation appears in the quest "Disasterpiece": the scene in which the powerful Adam Smasher disembodies the arm of Johnny Silverhand - as played by the transcendently wooden Keanu Reeves - demonstrates in brilliant form the duality of the human and transhuman condition. On the one hand, Johnny loses his cybernetic prosthesis - a symbol of both his tragic past and the ongoing techno-ontological conflict within his psyche; on the other hand, it is precisely due to this dismemberment that Smasher is blown to bits of scrap by a sensational RTX explosion sequence.

And the final disintegration of the antagonist's body into a bloodspray of metallic gore... how should this be interpreted? It is a metaphorical cry of deeply rooted despair, a manifestation of the personal transgression. This fragmentation of body could likewise be interpreted as a fragmentation of the individual mind, thus provoking the question: Whose mind? Indeed, had everything the player seen of Johnny's struggle been, in fact, a personified, embodied fear? Had he not been embroiled in epic battle with a vile corporation, but rather only with himself? Could the entirety of Johnny-V's narrative have only been a manifestation of some cyberpsychotic dream-state?

Among all the depth and nuance that has defined this franchise since its inception, only one thing is truly certain - Cyberpunk 2077 has forever changed the world of video games.

preparing my finest, largest pair of clownshoes for anyone who tries to use the update that adds new apartments that you'll spend maybe 1 minute in each to make the one millionth attempt to rehabilitate this game. all a stable framerate will do to this game is let you see crystal clear how fucking ugly it is in attitude and design.

please just let this shit, racist, transphobic game made by overworked and abused developers die the death it so richly deserves to. there are so many pieces on this website and elsewhere either going for an infuriatingly smug centrist "both extremes are bad" read or desperately trying to resuscitate CP2077 by putting outrageous effort into finding whatever gold exists in the salted earth of these awful hills and it just isn't worth it on any level. i promise you, every second of that effort would be better served on almost every other game.