GAME REVIEW: Eastshade
Did you ever play Skyrim and think, “this is great and all, but I wish there was less dungeon crawling and more painting?” Or have you ever wished your video games were more adult and open-minded regarding things like queerness and healthy drug use? Well good news, you should check out Eastshade (from Eastshade Studios and Do Games Limited) right away!
This was recommended to me by an artist friend, who loved the pretty, artsy style. I mean, what artist wouldn’t love to play a game about painting, right? I would recommend this more highly to PC gamers with a good graphics card, as the rendering was really bad at times on the PS4 - especially when in the boat in the northern parts of Eastshade, where the ice is, a lot of the visuals would be missing until you got close to them. And I don’t just mean a few layers of texture, I mean like a whole mountain of ice would be missing until you’re near enough for it to render. This also caused some issues regarding gameplay as well, wherein if too much was going on, the game might freeze (a spot near the ruins froze for me repeatedly when I first visted it). On the PS4, it wasn’t fully crashing, and the game didn’t seem to have a good autosave mechanism the way games like Skyrim have to prevent these crashes from being a big deal (I never lost more than a handful of minutes’ worth of time in Skyrim at worst, whereas in Eastshade, I lost well over half an hour’s worth of wandering and gathering items and doing quests).
Beyond a few technical hiccups, if I had any more pressing issues with the game, it was that it wasn’t bigger! To put it simply, the game is gorgeous and wandering it incites that Skyrim-y open world feeling, where you can gather crafting and story items (I wanted more items to gather!), paint beautiful landscapes (I wanted more commissions to fulfil!), and help weird anthropomorphic animal people (I wanted more creepy animal people to help!), so I just wanted more! The main quest involves painting four paintings in memory of the PC’s mother, who loved Eastshade, but there are a lot of fun little adventures within the world, involving painting or just doing quests. Again, my biggest complaint was just that the game wasn’t bigger! I wished the western bluffs had more civilization to explore, that there were some trickier commissions to paint, that there were some more complicated quests (like the thief quest at the inn) to solve. And, okay, to be nitpicky again, a pennyfarthing for speed? The thing only worked on streets and was impossible to control! I do like that the game’s controls are slow, to allow the player to enjoy the scenery and take one’s time to explore the surroundings, but when exploring or completing tasks, the poor map mechanics and slow run speed become rather tedious.
That all said, the world was just so charming, it was really fun to be in it! I played it through in a day or two while down with COVID and found it was the perfect sort of quiet, gentle game for me to play while sick and wanting something sweet and feel-good. I enjoyed helping the nice people and calling out the shysters every time. Furthermore, there was a subtle / not-so-subtle allegory in the Dream Tea towards certain substances that are becoming legalized, as well as a purely scientific take on the subject of hallucinogenic mushrooms, which felt extremely mature (as well as modern and scientific), while the religious leader was a creepy cultist who asks you to sabotage her rivals.
Again, I feel like the makers of this game have similar morals and principles to me, as there are at least two notably gay couples in the game: Viktir’s house holds a letter from his missing partner, Nils, who misses him and is returning home; and of course, the couple from one of the quests: Everina and Leilani. Perhaps it’s also the good moral foundation that made this world so charming for an adult, despite being playable for much younger ages. There aren’t a lot of games that are enrapturing that don’t involve beating the shit out of and/or killing a bunch of people/monsters, so when a game helps you chill in the moment for a bit, I’m all for it.
It’s not perfect and a slow system will drive you nuts, but ultimately, it’s a really sweet, fun, open game. I would give it a solid recommendation!
