People can use pans to fry in cooking simulators, block bullets battle royale games, and now, it's very useful when smacking monsters down in the JRPG Eastward!
Recently appeared (again) at EGX 2019, Eastward is a beautiful love letter to the 90s' classic JRPG games. You can see the trailer of the game that aired a year ago below to see how it looks:
The story of Eastward
Eastward takes the settings of the near-future world, where the world's population is shrinking to the lowest level ever seen. And as the world is on the edge of ruin, a diligent miner namely John has come across a little girl named Sam deep down under a mysterious facility.
Sam doesn't have any memories of her origin, and the nice miner John will have to leave the town and bringing her to the hostile world out there to find it. Through their adventure, they'll encounter a lot of dangerous creatures continuously growing in nearby towns, eating everything they see.
With the kind heart of John and the superpower of Sam, will they be able to unravel this mystery? Let's learn about it through the emotional and charismatic story of Eastward!
Main features
Eastward is a JRPG from the Shanghai indie developer Pixpil, which portrays the world with the vivid visuals of the 90s Japanese animated movies. You'll take control of two characters - the old miner John and the cute little girl Sam. Together, you'll discover this dying continent and find the mystery behind the population decline and the origin of Sam.
The graphics of this game is very outstanding, as it mixed the retro-style pixelated visuals with modern 3D lighting techniques. As a result, the near-future world of Eastward is very vibrant with glooming towns, shady forests, and various campsite.
Lying in those places are a lot of monsters, which needs both of the characters to join hands to deal with. Each of them has different abilities, which come in handy in different situations.
To be more specific, John is a man of action, as he can use his multiple weapons to get rid of the monsters. It's quite usual as he can use a gun to spray them down or a flamethrower to fry them into ashes, but when his ammo runs out, it's time for the old trusty pan to do the job! Such a powerful weapon the pan is!
On the other hand, Sam is more of a magical girl, in which she can freeze the enemies with her unknown power. Furthermore, she can also shrink the vegetation that she meets away, which is very useful at looting items and power-ups.
Eastward is not only about continuous fights but also adventuring as well. Specifically, John and Sam will have to solve a lot of challenging puzzles on their way. Sometimes, you'll have to split the two to different locations to trigger the paths, and sometimes you'll have to let them work together.
You can control both of them at the same time, or letting one standing still while moving the other. The puzzles in this game are quite diverse, so it will cost you several our getting used to its mechanics.
Lastly, you'll learn about the story through a cast of characters with quirky personalities. And as Sam loves John for going alongside her, the story of Eastward will be very heart-warming.
Release date and supported platforms
Unfortunately, Eastward doesn't have an official release date yet. In fact, the developer Pixpil only leaves us a huge "Coming soon" message regarding the release windows of the game.
The only thing we know right this moment is that it will be available for PC and Switch at launch.
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