Eastward is paying homage to some of the developer Pixpil's favorite games of yesteryear, namely The Legend of Zelda series, Dragon Quest and Earthbound, but oddly enough, my experience playing it was not dominated by comparisons to those influences. Instead, I spent a lot of my time playing Eastward thinking about the nature of the silent protagonist. In Eastward, your main character is named John, and John is a silent protagonist. In the opening cinematic before the main menu, John finds Sam in a kind of life support tank deep within the mine he works in. As the game itself begins, he adopts her as his daughter and yada yada yada, they're forced to travel together across a post-apocalyptic world. If you're thinking to yourself "huh, that sounds a lot like The Last of Us!" you'd be right! And so as I played, I actually thought about that game more often than the others.
I got the feeling while playing this game that John is a silent protagonist not because there is a good story reason for it, but because Ness is a silent protagonist in Earthbound, the Hero is a silent protagonist in Dragon Quest, and Link is a silent protagonist in (most) Zelda games. But the game that has the most similar story and character setup to Eastward, The Last of Us, crucially does not have a silent protagonist. In The Last of Us, you are not only able to see and experience how Ellie feels, but crucially, you get Joel's side of things as he slowly opens up to Ellie throughout the game. In Eastward, I never got a good sense of how John feels about this situation that he's found himself in (adopting a little girl he found in a cave, being exiled from his hometown underground and forced to travel across the dangerous surface) other than feeling protective of Sam. There are many, many story beats throughout Eastward that fell completely flat for me because there was a clear opportunity to have John express himself. But instead, he stands there like a sack of potatoes as the story happens around him. John is not a blank slate for me to imprint myself on- he is a poor man, who has toiled away in the mines until suddenly everything got shaken up, as described earlier. Giving him any sort of personality, letting me know how he feels about literally any of these wacky situations would have gone so far toward me enjoying the story more than I did. Instead, John ho-hums and putzes his way through the game, barely reacting to what's happening around him...and I soon found myself doing the same.
Joining me on the podcast to discuss Eastward is Chris Dominguez, one of the two hosts of A Novel Console, a podcast dedicated to video games, books and food. As I told them on the show- if you're not up for video games, books and food, I don't know what to tell you. You can check out their show by following this link, and I was also on their show last week to talk about The Lord of the Rings and all of the other Tolkien adaptations.
You can listen to episode 65 of Tales from the Backlog (Eastward) in the player below, or you can follow the links to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podcast Addict, Stitcher, Google Podcasts or search "Tales from the Backlog" in your favorite podcast app!