I often find RPG’s overdo the cooking element in such a way that it becomes an annoying part of the game rather than a pleasant moment (I’m looking at you FF15).Įastward is a dungeon crawler but manages to hide it well. The cooking minigame is very simple but effective enough. It’s apt that it’s a frying pan, because once he’s washed the monster blood and goop from the base, John can cook with it, and make a nice variety of health-point restoring dishes, which you can feast on mid-battle if need be. You use your trusty frying pan to knock stuff around, and a number of mini-games are built around this – knocking seeds into a hole, or whacking flying pigs into their pen, or pushing off from raft points. Ride the RailsĪrmed with a frying pan (and later a little gun and flamethrower) for most of the game, John spends his time navigating dungeon-like areas, mostly in a relatively linear fashion, solving door, lock and sliding puzzles. An apocalyptic train ride across a world struggling to adapt to its newfound hardships, held together by the wonderous joy and tireless bond of Sam and John, Eastward draws you in almost effortlessly and keeps tight hold until the train has come to a complete stop.

There’s far more to be seen by the end of some 5-6 chapters and around a 30-hour plot. What’s the saying? It’s not the destination that matters… They feel like lovable wholesome vignettes in a journey. There are episodes in certain towns that in a lesser game might be considered filler, but with Sam’s energy and joy permeating through, it never feels like that. But it’s the strength of the bond between John and Sam, the never-leave-each-other, do-or-die, you’ll-always-be-there-right love that really holds the whole thing together. It’s a pretty episodic framework by the time you get well into it, but there’s reasons for that I won’t go into here. It’s cute, quirky, not afraid to spend plenty of time setting up characters just to move on to the next town and never see them again.

Add in the slow build of clues about Sam’s pod-child origins and you’ve got the makings of a great little story. As the miasma follows you and towns in your wake fall silent, there’s a sinister edge to things. Seems maybe the mayor was protecting his town from something after all. They get embroiled in each town’s story, helping out and making friends, but also encountering and investigating the sinister miasma – a black fog that rolls across the surface world and kills on contact. This is not much of a punishment, and so begins their adventure, riding the rails from town to town, exploring a post-apocalyptic world. However, with their new knowledge, they are now a threat to the town and are banished, thrown on a train going Eastward from which no one ever returns. Sam lives with John who takes care of her as her guardian, but when they venture through the Ancient Ruins (an abandoned shopping centre above the station) they find the way out of their tiny world. Ruled over by a tyrant mayor, no one is allowed to even mention the world above let alone leave. The story starts in Potcrock Isle, but don’t be fooled by its name it’s an underground Fallout-type bunker town that resembles an old train station.

Eastward video game