#EASTWARD PLOT HOW TO#

This wouldn’t be a dealbreaker by itself. As with the dungeons themselves, the enemy encounters do get more interesting near the end of the game - but by then it’s too little, too late. Most enemies are easily dispatched without ever switching weapons or using Sam’s powers the only time they provide a real challenge is when they end up directly on top of your character model, where John’s most frantic pan swings won’t do anything. This tedium is only exacerbated by the enemies that respawn every time you leave a room (and some that respawn while you’re still in it), as the combat in most of the dungeons is fairly dull. The vibrantly questionable characters of Eastward This is fine the first few times, but quickly begins to feel like a chore. The standard bomb takes about 6 seconds to go off, during which time you have nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs or admire the same environmental tiles you’ve stared at for the past five rooms. At least a dozen times in each dungeon, you’ll be forced to use John’s frying pan or bombs to clear the way forward. Herein lies one of my biggest issues with Eastward: most of the dungeon crawling was boring. It isn’t until the final few chapters that any of the block-exploding and switch-smashing provide a real challenge, and by that point I was pretty ready for the game to be over. I use the word puzzle here very lightly, as it’s unlikely you’ll spend more than ten seconds solving any of them.

#EASTWARD PLOT HOW TO#

You’ll go through a twenty minute dungeon basically every time the game wants to teach you something new, whether it be how to clear certain obstacles with a bomb, or how to switch between Sam and John to get through one of the game’s many puzzles. The game gets off to a slow start, with the first few hours serving as an overly long tutorial for the game’s puzzle mechanics. In some ways - its art, world design, and clever blend of SNES game mechanics - Eastward is one of these triumphs, while in other ways - its dialogue, pacing, and balance - PixPil’s freshman effort falls flat. There are numerous successes with this formula, such as Shovel Knight or Undertale: games that, while relying heavily on the titles of decades past, manage to improve or iterate on their source material to the point that they’re worthy successors. Taking a classic retro game and bringing it into the modern era with a new coat of paint (and maybe some new mechanics) has been a solid strategy for a while now. When it works, it really works, but a lot of the time, Eastward puts the crawl in dungeon crawl. In other words, those of you waiting for your Earthbound/Zelda mash-up need wait no longer! It’s here, it’s got a cute little girl (Sam) and her tall/strong/silent protector (John), it’s got weird NPCs and dungeons aplenty, and it’s even got a 100% playable 8-bit game within.

Luckily, there are publishers out there like Chucklefish willing to give a small studio like PixPil a chance to make exactly the game they want to (rather than whatever has the best microtransaction potential). It’s probably still pretty tough to sell the EA board on a game that’s “Like cult-classic SNES JRPG Earthbound, but with action like A Link to the Past”. One of the wonderful things about the rise of the indie game developer is the increase in the number of titles that draw inspiration from gaming’s past.

Warning: This review contains minor spoilers for the plot of Eastward.

Eastward plot