Wrangling flying pigs, saving a nerdy kid from the school bullies, cooking up exquisite dishes to appease a local casino boss whose slot machines you accidentally rinsed with your trusted lucky coin... These are the stories most adventure RPGs would stuff into their ever-growing sidequest menus - distractions meant to provide extra flavour to the world you're meant to be saving, or which hold bountiful supplies of EXP to level up your skills and weapons. Not so in Eastward.
In this impressive debut from Shanghai developers Pixpil, these humdrum slices of life are placed front and centre, forming much of the narrative backbone that drives the game forward. This is still a game that's ultimately about saving the world from a mysterious and all-consuming miasma, but it's also one that makes damn sure you know what you're doing it all for - and that's its striking cast of NPCs. As you busy yourself with the minutiae of their everyday lives, Eastward makes every person (and robot) count in this deadly post-apocalypse, and the result is an affecting, detail-rich tale that owes as much to the action of top-down Zelda games as it does to the role-playing intimacy of Earthbound.
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