Eastward Review: A Game Without Direction
Eastward is, visually, a beautiful game, and it holds elements of what make a lot of other games great. But for all its references, it never manages to live up to its apparent source material, leaving it struggling to form its own identity.
In games as in any medium, borrowing from your predecessors, explicitly or implicitly, is part of how things get made. It’s so common that there are entire genres named for particularly distinct games that have inspired others. This alone is not grounds for criticism. Indeed, one of the main areas that Eastward shines is where it manages to elevate what it borrows. Its lighting system is beautiful, taking its nostalgic art style and making it feel all that much more lived in. Its puzzles, while familiar, benefit from having two characters to control. But it hasn’t really introduced anything entirely new either. There have been a million games that try to be the next Zelda, Earthbound, Dark Souls, etc. But the problem is that the reason the original games get this attention is because of the way they are so distinct, and manage so successfully to forge their own identities, even when, themselves, borrowing from other works. Eastward fails to account for this. Lighting aside, its sprites feel like Mother 3, and its combat and puzzles are very Zelda-like, while rarely living up to the potential suggested by the freedom of having two characters. The possibilities suggested by even its better ideas are never fully realized. A good story could have helped a great deal. But its narrative is about as well developed as the rest of the game.
Eastward never seems to be able to decide on what it wants to be. The characters and the setting want to meander, and work best when on a very small scale. Sam being so excited about Earth Born. The dynamic between Alva and Isabel. The awe of exploring New Dam City. The confusion between John (human) and John (dog) sharing a name. All of these are early highlights when you encounter them. But the game ultimately casts that aside in favour of bigger aspirations where the world hangs in the balance and lives are at stake, and it never manages to live up to those moments afterwards.
For the strength of a number of the game’s characters, every time things start to get big, their actions become so inconsistent with the rest of their characterization that it just feels forced. Not to mention the characters that seem there almost entirely just to force things in a certain direction. The main antagonist, even, is entirely baffling. In an apparent attempt to create a sense of mystery, you don’t know really anything about your primary source of opposition. Except there’s never the payoff that you’d expect from a mystery, and his motivation is so inscrutable that his efforts never feel organic. I’m a firm believer in subtlety in storytelling. You really don’t have to tell the player everything. But surely you have to tell them something. In a sprawling, story-driven game, you must communicate some motivation, some breadcrumbs to foster the player’s curiosity.
My distaste for its storytelling aside, as a player, no matter which side of the action you prefer, the fast or the slow, the other drags it down. If, like me, you preferred the slow moving sections where the setting and characters were allowed to breathe, that being squashed by hamfisted and poorly explained plot advancement will leave you disappointed. And if you prefer the moments where the stakes are high and the plot is moving, you’ll likely be frustrated by the incredibly slow pacing in the rest of the game.
Eastward, if anything, is a game that points to the importance of editing and direction. Cool ideas still need to be refined, developed, and aligned, in order to make a good, cohesive game. You can still fit moments of action and moments of quiet into the same story. You can use familiar art styles to create something new. You can turn those iterative puzzles into something unique and memorable. But all of those require a lot of work in order to do so, and you have to know where you’re taking those ideas. Eastward, in the end, didn’t feel like it knew where it was headed.