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Beautiful game, awesome sounds, mediocre story, too much dialogue that seemingly drags on and on, and on, and on, and on... Gameplay is linear in plot, with some fun gameplay when it comes to the boss fights. Much of the gameplay otherwise feels too repetitive. Game may cause mental fatigue.

Eastward is a beautifully crafted game set in a postapocalyptic world where the story takes place with progressive travels eastward. The game has a so much charm and the developers clearly put a ton of effort into making the world exactly as they envisioned it. Even the soundtrack is amazing to listen to.

However, the story drags on in many places, and the actual gameplay is severely limited by its lengthy dialogue. If you are one who likes to skip dialogues and cut scenes, then you are going to have no idea what is going on with this game. The good thing is that there is some creative humor built into the story to provide the player an occasional chuckle. Unfortunately, artwork and a fairly mediocre story with very linear gameplay isn't enough to bring me to view the game favorably overall.

I did take my time and wander about the game-world thoroughly to do as much as possible as the game progressed, trying to find joy and to lose myself in the world and its story. There's a lot to see and decent amount of small puzzles to make the gameplay not feel so straight forward. However, it never really leaves the main formula of repetitive room locks where there's a key hidden behind a puzzle, which require some additional maneuvers, often time sensitive, to complete.

The most fun I had with the game involves the boss fights, they are all unique, fit the story world very well, and definitely well designed. They are pattern based and take a few do-overs to figure out what to do before finishing them off with your trusty frying pan. (Yes, your main weapon is the frying pan that you also use to cook up your delicious meals.) But the other in-game combat felt boring and tedious in general.

For people wishing to see every aspect of the game and attain all achievements, this is a fairly tedious task. Once you complete the main game, you now can see an "Extra" menu option to select which chapter to load into using the data from a previous save. So if you are missing specific things, it's not so difficult to go back and obtain. (Now you ought to be armed with a guide, unless you truly want to do everything on your own.)

In addition, there's a separate game-in-game feature of an old-school JRPG called Earth Born that you will need to run through twice at any point during the game or afterwards. It does show up in the Extra menu as well. You can play the game with some saved progress, though mostly starting over each time you die. The game gets easier the more you spend time obtaining Pixballs from the main game that gives you extra items in your inventory in the sub-game. You only have 7 in-game days for each run of this mini-game, with time passing fairly quickly. So you will reach a reset if you run out of time or if you die.

The biggest reason for me for giving this game a thumbs down was the fact that slogging through the main plot for the first time, I felt quite a bit of mental fatigue. It's as if I worked a full week and the end was nowhere in sight. I don't remember the last time I felt burned out from playing a game, even bad ones. Those I could just quit and uninstall. Not sure why I felt the need to finish the game and even complete all of the achievements afterwards. Probably because I thought that since I was already close, might as well. Not a great way to spend my time overall.

Of note, I played through Earth Born and obtained the Pixballs after completing everything else, that was quite enjoyable. Felt like I jumped through a time warp to land in an arcade machine from the earlier times of video games.

This was a game I had been looking forward to for such a long time, I think that was part of the disappointment as well. Felt like the actual experience was a really big let down from all of my own fantastical expectations.