Bought Eastward today and will start tonight. The game looks amazing at least. Any opinions on it here on Fami?
I was about to make a post about it, actually… I’m only in chapter three but I have some grievances
The gameplay is good! I like it a lot!
The art and colors? beautiful!
The scenes, and the scene pacing, and the dialogue, and the re-use of musical cues………… not as much of a fan!
and the unnecessary random creep shit and low-key misogyny just peppered in is like… why y’all? why?
like, for example, I was just put in a situation where I (as the child) in a
mandatory quest had to steal a dominatrix outfit from a combination casino / sex club for a woman who
did not want to wear it because a bunch of dudes thought it would make their circus more marketable
like the writing just does so many weird things like that! or even just random characters saying this little kid needs a boyfriend?? like if I wanted to relive weird passive-aggressive and heteronormative things adults said to child me in the nineties, I would just go to a normie Reddit or go to one of those mass terrorism “gender reveal” events people keep talking about
and like again, I do have an admittedly low threshold for cringe — but if it were more minor, or less frequent, or if the weird dialogue + cutscenes + maybe you automatically go to the place or maybe you have to walk there + scripted events weren’t so frequent and driving and whiplashy… maybe I’d be less annoyed?
like for a game about a kid, her quiet but caring guardian, and the end of the world — it’s just got so much weird scripted shit going on
the gameplay is really fun and I enjoy it! I just feel like I have to fight for every scrap of it
and maybe I’m just like… bad at enjoying RPGs
but this is next level
there’s so little choice, you just have to go through the conversations. and sometimes they have great moments! but so much of it is a big “???” from me
like it’s not like choosing to do a sidequest, or like anything in Undertale where you do some talking + puzzle + walking + fighting with excellent pacing and sound cues
it just feels so convoluted
and the sound cue whiplash in conversations is really fucking bad. like “oh this is a designated tender conversation! ope person b started talking so here’s the zany sound cue! ope here’s the unduly upbeat basic cozy conversation sound cue!” sometimes all within the same chunk of dialogue.
and the scripting / pacing — another example, I’m doing a crucial task that diverged into another crucial task while something was on the stove. and I kept going back because I was like “if I leave this on the stove I’ll fail the first crucial task instead of this other thing the game wants me to do” — and it kept redirecting me by force. I had to do the entire bad idea section to be able to even get back to the thing I was now destined to fail.
but the gameplay is good, dammit! and I wanna get at the meat of the mystery! there’s just SO MUCH that feels SO INORGANIC in between!