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. ![]() 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.
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