John is a scruffy hard-working digger who works in the mine shafts to make a living. Sam on the other hand is a brave and cheeky white haired young girl being looked after by John. She follows him almost everywhere with a burning curiosity for the world around them.

Their meeting is never fully explored in-game, but you can see plain as day that regardless of their origins, they have a wholesome and loving attachment to each other. John is the always silent, barely emotive type whereas Sam is a bubbly ball of talkative energy. Although John is Sam’s adoptive father figure, Sam is the communicator and narrative leader. This allows Eastward to let us view this post-apocalyptic setting through the excitable wonder of a child’s perspective.

The gameplay of Eastward is to guide John and Sam through different tasks, puzzles, and obstacles as you inadvertently make your way to discover more about the outside world along with the mystery of the destructive miasma. You control both John and Sam together, able to switch between them intuitively to use their different skill sets to aid you through the puzzles and mutated creatures you will encounter. 

John takes on the more melee of roles, using his trusty frying pan and bombs to beat away the monsters and obstacles. Sam instead uses her budding mysterious supernatural powers to hold enemies in their tracks and interact with objects from a distance. You unlock more weapons and abilities as you continue through the game like the shotgun, flamethrower and energy bursts. These tools then allow you adventure out further into previously unreachable areas.

Eastward isn’t just focused on fighting monsters and solving puzzles, there are also plenty of things to do on the side. Little mini-games, optional side quests, town mysteries, and most of all, talking and interacting with others. Eastward gives you plenty of small clues to let you piece the story together yourself, as long as you take the time to explore the world around you that is. The game rewards those who take their time absorbing the dialogue in each area, rather than blasting through the game as fast as you can. 

At times, the amount of talking and dialogue to go through can make the scenes drag on for longer than it really needs to. Of course, there is no escaping that in a narrative-focused game with no voice acting. But in the end, I felt more satisfaction from the game in those little moments. Taking that extra bit of time to listen to an NPC paint an image of their life made the world feel more substantial.

The things that have captivated me the most about Eastward is its beautifully diverse and lovable cast of characters. Everyone you talk to has their own tangible personality expressed both through their character designs and their dialogue. Some can lean to the more stereotyped or caricature side of designs but are not degraded or made out to be the butt of some cruel “joke”. There are NPC’s of all diverse shapes, sizes, races, gender identities, even LGBTQI+ relationships. They’re all just going about living their lives freely in the background. Robots and humans live together in companionship and even marriage without even so much as a sideways glance.

It has heartened me to see this varied representation and attention to little details. These small things unrelated to the plot may go unnoticed by most gamers, but these out of focus moments have made Eastward an immensely more enjoyable playthrough than I was expecting.

Pixpil really has succeeded in making a pixel art game where you will feel real emotions for imaginary people. I have developed such an affection for these charming characters and the story that ties them all together. It’s safe to say that Eastward takes the stage as my favourite game release of 2021 so far.