Eastward is a placid action-adventure game from developer Pixpil and publisher Chucklefish. You play as John and Sam inside a cryptic, post-apocalyptic scenario, pretty much just living your lives as happenstances befall both you and your strong moral compasses demand you intervene.
The game and it is plot are extremely slow. You’re not given any big planet-saving quest, obviously from the onset. You’re no longer working clearly towards a particular mission. And also the action happens sparsely between narrative moments and smaller quests. The slow nature of Eastward is benefited by its entire essence, though. From the beautiful 16-bit aesthetic to plucky Sam and silent John, to personality-full NPCs, to 1 of the greatest soundtracks recently, there’s zero about this game that makes you feel rushed to determine anything beyond what’s directly before you.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t expertly sprinkle intrigue throughout. You'll certainly be asking all of the right questions in the onset, and very, very slowly, you’ll get various pieces of information through hearsay, myths, and accidents. It’s all a combination that feels like it only works together; if you took any of its parts out, the game would fall apart.
Mechanically, I had been thrilled the moment I realized the game took it's origin from real-time action rather than turn-based combat like its obvious Earthbound influence. The two characters, John and Sam, each have their utilities; John does combat together with his frying pan or some different ranged weapons while Sam uses her strange abilities to freeze enemies or clear obstacles. The 2 move together with the capability to swap at will, or you can split them apart to partake of the game’s many puzzles. Areas get repetitive after a while and between unlocking new mechanics, but the localities are extremely wonderful and also the gameplay so fun that it almost didn’t matter. The game also benefits from several fun side bits like its cooking mechanic having a robust menu to uncover, a set of collectibles to procure, as well as an entire RPG to play within the game itself.
Here’s the one thing, though, about Eastward. The sport begins inside a dismal underground city run with a terrible and terrifying Mayor Hoffman. He’s fat, includes a big nose, is probably fairly greedy, and no-one can accrue power or wealth without his permitting it. This is fine in isolation, maybe, but Hoffman is a very obvious and frequently Jewish surname. And specifically, it’s a reputation that may be a consequence of the traditional medieval Jewish occupations for example financing and lending that giver rise to some of history’s most acrid antisemitism. I have no aim of accusing the game’s developers of purposely creating a character that I couldn’t unsee as an antisemitic caricature as soon as I did. Still, I’m also pretty unsettled by it, along with the total lack of mention of this by anyone else online.
Worse yet, after i noticed this frustrating depiction, I kept spiraling into increasingly more causes for concern. The game’s second location, which I won’t describe since it’s still worth the experience yourself, has a female character name Uva who's suddenly and overwhelmingly in love with John. Their encounter ends on a possible moral of how Uva shouldn’t have to be somebody for John to love her, despite what all the other women in town try to let her know, but the whole encounter feels icky, especially since it happened immediately after my Hoffman revelation. Uva is pressured into this situation, her body sexualized from the get-go by the creepy older men and women alike, and none of it makes sense even in the context from the plot. Also, the jiggle mechanics on her sprite are extremely uncomfortable, especially because the sprites do this passive up and down of the shoulders. Lastly, John is really a completely silent protagonist, which sometimes has funny meta moments because individuals just talk at him and, when he doesn’t respond, make assumptions about his intent. But here, his silence is loud when he can’t react to Uva’s advances and express his feelings or intentions. The only real sense I acquired was that he was as creeped out and uncomfortable when i was, honestly.
Then there’s the fact that inside a later locale designed to give impressions of Japan, and there’s a set of characters you’re meant to believe are ruffians with clearly Asian-sounding names who all look inexplicably like monkeys while nobody else in town, especially the folks who are depicted as white, have a similar resemblance. It can’t often be a coincidence. You will find five of those characters who all have uncanny likenesses to monkeys between their ears and cheeks, their masks, or their mechanical suits. As well as this Japanese-inspired town includes a princess who's depicted as white. Also, I simply cannot tell if Sam, who's clearly a child, has similar jiggle mechanics to Uva, or if it’s said to be her hips since she’s short that that’s what’s upgrading and down, but either way, that observation was the final straw.
Independently, perhaps none of those issues would have hurt my experience so strongly. But such as the rest of why is the sport so strong, together, they've created a swimming pool of problems for me that I simply cannot overlook.
Eastward is a superb game. It’s beautiful, it’s a story well-told, and it’s very fun to experience. However for me, the whole experience was tainted by what I then and inescapably regarded as racist and sexually exploitative depictions, that is just this type of monumental shame of the aspect to tarnish a normally incredible experience. I mean, this game comes with an entire virtual RPG video game built into it that you can play. However i simply can’t rate this experience highly with how tarnished my look at everything is. I love playing it, I suggest playing it, however i also insist you judge on your own these character depictions and whether they satisfy the standards we should expect from games.
Eastward is available now on Nintendo Switch, Mac, and PC.
