There’s one evocative storyline involving a lesbian scientist, Ava, and her tense, worried partner, Isobel, and another involving a father, William, hiding a secret about his son, Daniel, but both are underserved. And none of these activities are optional.Įastward, in short, is stifled by dead air, though there’s also a sense here that the developers never quite figured out where to concentrate their efforts.
That quest itself gets derailed so you can help the town’s theater troupe. A tense moment of the Miasma consuming a town is delayed so you can go on a fetch quest for cooking ingredients for a bet.
Eastward forbidden land how to#
A melancholy story of a lonely village woman falling in love with Sam and not knowing how to communicate with him stretches on in a circular conversation with no payoff for the length of an episode of a sitcom. But there are too few scenes across Eastward that don’t feel distended with dialogue. The writing is fun, often funny, sometimes even poignant, heartbreaking, even distressingly grim and allegorical. In the end, though, this is a game that prioritizes quantity over quality. Which is to say that the game’s puzzles, at their best, really make the player feel smart without ever feeling like they’re an excuse for the developers to flex their own smarts. All of that is difficult enough to be challenging, especially the tricky, hard-hitting bosses, but never impossible. The two can also be split up, separated by barriers or obstacles, and must figure out how to manipulate switches, obstacles, or even the enemy placement, killing very specific ones down a path or lighting up particular plants in order to get themselves to the exit. John is able to directly kill monsters with weaponry, and Sam is able to defend and stun enemies. There’s also the fact that you control John and Sam at the same time, swapping between them at will. The game’s title card doesn’t even show up until halfway through that introductory period. The actual gameplay is introduced through a few short dungeons, but none of them particularly advance what we know about this world either. Instead, it stretches out to an interminable four thanks to piles upon piles of padded dialogue, goofy comic relief sections that go nowhere, and repetitive harping on the quest at hand. But it’s one that should have taken all of an hour to play out.
That’s an intriguing and evocative prologue, which is matched by a playfully colorful and expressive aesthetic courtesy of the developers at the Shanghai-based Pixpil.
After Sam forces John to rescue her after getting lost in a perilous part of town, the two are banished from their homes and forced up to survive above ground in our lush and beautiful but cursed Earth, whose friendly, bustling, and eccentric settlements are periodically sieged by a black, life-swallowing mass called the Miasma. Humanity is living through a sort of post-post apocalypse, where the surface world has been deemed forbidden. The poster child for an unnecessarily bloated gaming experience in 2021 should be some AAA open-world action title with a thousand collectibles scattered across its environs, not a beautiful Legend of Zelda-inspired indie such as this one.Įastward tells the story of John, a mute, bearded miner living in the underground shantytown of Potcrock, where he plays guardian to Sam, a precocious little girl with flowing white locks. And yet, as it plods on, pushing its various goalposts further and further away with every scene, it’s clear that no game in recent memory has ever needed an editor more. All of the right ingredients for a truly heartwarming, triumphant little RPG exist within Eastward.
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