Written by Taoan, 2021 Cohort
Though 3D graphics games are the mainstream in the game industry nowadays, 2D graphics, especially pixel art will never become old-fashioned. There are a lot of indie games created with pixel art: Stardew Valley, Undertale and Crypt of the NecroDancer, etc. Today，I am going to lead you into the world of an indie game called “Eastward”, which was released 10 days ago (16th Sep 2021).
Eastward is a Singleplayer Action RPG game with amazing Pixel art graphics, made by indie developers Pixpil, a Shanghai-based game studio. In a post-apocalyptic and dystopian world, players will take the role of Sam, a mysterious young girl who can wield kinetic powers, and John, a man of few words, swinging his frying pan to fight. They live in an underground village because of the miasma (an air pollutant), and they have to escape their home and join the outside world, because of being persecuted.
Story
As a story-driven game, Eastward did an excellent job. The main story of the game is amazing and I am not going to spoil it, what surprised me is in the details. Every time you push the story forward a little bit, The NPC in the current scene will have a different dialogue. Besides, players save the game data through the fridge in the scene. And every time you save your data, fridges in different scenes will share different philosophical thoughts with you. Let me reference the dialogue of the first fridges for you:” You can refrigerate your memories here. But when you take them out again… Will the new you be really you?”
Gameplay
Source from Steam Eastward Page
As for the combat part, the gameplay resembles 2D Zelda games. You can play as John, fighting the enemies with different weapons like flamethrower, bomber, or your best friend frying pan, or Sam with her kinetic blast. There are also some low-difficulty puzzles (compared to the 2D Zelda game I played before). Also, they have a cooking feature, you can prepare healing items with your food collections, just like Breath of the wild. The most interesting part I want to address is that talk is that Pixpil made an in-game game called “Earth Born”. If you know the Japanese RPG series “Dragon Quest”, you will recognize this Easter egg! With the GameBoy style pixel art, the turn-based RPG gameplay, you can finish this arcade game in every town, because it is the most famous game in the Eastward world! There is also a gacha machine beside each arcade, Sam and John can use the tokens they have collected throughout the journey to get the Earth Born monster figures, which have different abilities that will make the Earth Born Adventure easier (I consider this as Nintendo Amiibos Easter egg because it is quite similar)!
Graphics
The plot and the gameplay are full of details, and of course, the graphics are matching the same style. According to Wikipedia, three Pixpil team members began development on the game in 2015. I followed them in 2017, at that time I was shocked by the quality of the graphics they made. First of all, they developed an in-house game engine for the game. The lighting in the engine can affect the 2D props with a special texture channel (the colour of this texture looks like a normal map). As a result, the assets in the scene look more stereoscopic than the common pixel art with rich colours. Besides, they put a lot of animation in the scenes, like the screen of the television, fluttering of the glass. As for the art style of the game, they put a lot of post-apocalyptic eastern Asian elements: Kowloon Walled City-like building, a signboard with Chinese letter or katakana, gacha machine…etc. Also, the gameplay and the cutscene animation are so smooth, I could not believe my eyes when I first played it.
Conclusion:
I am not a professional in the music field, so I am not going to talk a lot about sound effects and background music. The BGM is 8-bit style and it coordinates perfectly with the graphics and the plot. All in all, Eastward is an amazing game made by people from my country. Though there are still some elements it could do without, such as not being able to run in scenes, once in the next town, you can not return for the collections you missed… etc, I still think it is Game of the year for me because an indie studio was able to build such an awesome game with such few people. I wish I could make a game like this, and surprise the world in the future.