Sam is curious and wants to do things, and John facilitates that curiosity by being a great cook with a knack for violence. John is her silent, strong friend and father figure. Sam is a charming, excitable, magical young girl with white hair. This warmth extends to the game’s central relationship between co-protagonists Sam and John, whose relationship drives the game forward. There are fun, hopeful weirdos in all of them, which makes Eastward feel like such a warm game. Each of the game’s four - maybe five depending on how you count the monkey train - major areas are similarly well realised. You leave Potrock Isle relatively quickly, after unknowingly starting a quest to save the world, which makes all of this even more impressive.
It feels good to be there, even if it isn’t a great place to live. Everyone is strange, and most are loving. The whole place packs so much life and character into its six or so screens. It’s a place of poverty, but also small joys: cheap meals cooked well, standing outside your house and talking to someone for longer than you probably should, the intimacy of enduring shared shittiness. The game opens in a small, subterranean town called Potrock Isle, a town populated by a handful of miners and farmers, and ruled by a villainous and power-hungry mayor. By this metric, it’s a brilliant translation. I wanted to experience the game as an effort of translation - a thing that turns the developer’s love for these games into something touchable and raw. A Link to the Past is great! But it did not mark my heart like it did for many people, which is why I wanted to play Eastward. I have no strong feelings about EarthBound, which I’ve never played, or early Legend of Zelda games, which I have. There is a prophecy, the art of which so clearly resembles the Breath of the Wild 2 wall painting that it could feel almost plagiaristic if it wasn’t done so damn well. There are keys of Courage, Wisdom, and Power, which you use to unlock a big door. This is a top-down 2D action-adventure game with a playable, turn-based, item-heavy RPG called EarthBorn that you can optionally choose to play. It does not just wear these influences on its sleeve, but makes an entire shirt out of them. I don’t really know what to do with that.ĭeveloped by Pixpil and published by Chucklefish, Eastward is a love letter to EarthBound and classic Legend of Zelda games. I think Eastward’s heart is very big, but deeply misguided. But I cannot help but leave it feeling strange. Hell, they even put a second video game in the damn thing. Disregarding a few pacing missteps, the game fires on all cylinders for its entire duration. Its art and level design are nothing short of extraordinary. The ceastharacters are relentlessly charming. Eastward is a phenomenally constructed video game.
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