Eastward Reviews

Genuinely one of the most beautiful games I've had the pleasure of playing. From the music, to the backgrounds, to the characters and the story, there's so many things to appreciate about the craft of the game. The Mother and Legend of Zelda inspiration came through strong for me and drew on my nostalgia too.

i think this game one of my favorite, i love the artstyle and the story is pretty interesting to me, i really love the bond between sam and john, some characters is easy to forget but some of them are interesting. definitely i recommend to give it a try.

From Wargroove to this, bit of a leap lol. Thestudios that worked on this knocked it out of the park.

After about 24 hours, I really love this game. The pixel art style is awesome and the levels and cities have a great amount of detail. I think the areas look great and that's the best part of the game, but the story has been good too, and the duo of characters make for a unique strategy in combat and level traversal. The food and cooking stove always gets me feeling hungry. My dog likes to watch me play. This is one of my favorite games I'd have to say. It reminds me of Zelda and Pokemon, and I think has a lot in common with Sea of Stars, outside of the combat.

i love this game so much ! whilst the pacing is its biggest flaw, the story is to die for and the combat as challenging but achieveable !! so under rated

I'll make this short... Story: amazing! Gameplay: balls to the wall! Catching feels at random moments throughout the game. It's there. For the love of any deity, people, play this game.

Overall great game. A mixture of cozy vibes, great music, and challenging fighting and cool puzzles. Boss fights all had unique mechanics. The last two bosses were especially cool. If you enjoy immersing yourself into a beautiful world, talking to all the unique characters and seeing what unique things they will say each time you see them, and heart warming story, you'll really enjoy this game. About the 3/4 way it did fall off a bit in the direction it was going, but it picked up again and really paid off. Great game, absolutely love it. I will probably get the DLC now because I want more John and Sam.

13/6.4: what a lovely time my family and i had at this establishment! the food was incredible and honestly the staff was amazing. come here for brunch you wont regret it!

I really wanted to like this game - I love the Mothet series and zelda, but man does the writing suffer. very bloated script and gameplay is way too easy and boring. couldn't make it through ch 2 and apparently 3 is the real slog

Sadly: nope. **Amazingly beautiful unique art, but that's all.** Game designers should not feel entitled to make a player click through thousands of dialog textboxes when the designer isn't capable of writing a single worthwhile sentence. (And there's no option for faster message speed. There's a fast-forward button in-game but then it's too fast and you miss instructions.) Overall bad game-feel. Eastward fails at things that game designers knew how to do well 40 years ago: --Exits/entrances to rooms is not visually clear, even though this was never a problem in SNES games. It violates the norms of 2D RPG's by having many invisible walls where there's no visible barrier. --Enemies -Enemies respawn a few seconds after you (tediously) kill them. -The "gameplay" of hitting slug enemies with weapon doesn't feel fun on a mechanical input/response level. -When the slugs drop from the ceiling, it feels like padding because there's no game there. -Enemy hitboxes and behaviors are not programmed in a way that is interesting to engage with. --"Cooking" does not feel good or interesting to do. --Puzzles. Tedious power-line "puzzles" to power up doors is not fun or good. Wind turbines that restrict your character or push bombs around are not fun or good. (Pushing furniture to find secrets is fine.) --Environmental hazard, a certain thing a fair bit into the, is cheap toward the player and not fun to evade. You'll die 10 times in a row. You'll also have to do tedious box puzzles in the middle of the environmental hazard, and the game design is so bad that you'll have no visual clue which way the boxes can be moved. Not only is it obnoxiously unfun but it also shows the developers have no ideas for gameplay, it's not a big difference from random death. Then you're confronted with a hazard that you can't possibly evade...then the story interrupts with a deus ex machina rescue. Pathetically bad game design. --Sloppy bad sound design for example no GUI sound effect when you press Exit/Cancel button to exit menu, and there's also a slight delay when exiting menus. --It doesn't feel fun to walk around. I found myself just going to the next dull map marker point just to get it over with. --Even the excellent art has some weaknesses, like the non-pixel-art GUI pop-ups for items. It clashes with the rest of the aesthetic. And for example, when the player holds X to make the girl character do a magic charge the GUI pop-up isn't programmed well. --Tedious fetch quests whenever you're in the starting town area. --Story, Characters, Writing: all terrible. Random nonsensical villainy and creepiness, random weird "good" characters with terrible dialog (the jester, the woman in the forest town). It's embarrassingly bad. Many game devs inspired by Earthbound don't pay the slightest attention to any of the elements that made Earthbound good. Why can't we have good videogames?