Chill, walking simulator-cross-traveling painter game Eastshade has been in my backlog for a while now. If memory serves, it’s because I found mention of it having wonderful virtual landscapes during a time when I was writing about that aspect of games.
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Now, years on, I’ve finally made it into the world of EastShade and have fully embraced my role as a visiting painter for hire, intent on fulfilling some last requests by their late mother.
It’s a simple game in a small world, but its gentle chillness has been perfect to discover, seven years after its initial release. After a frantic and action-filled playthrough of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Eastshade has been a welcome change of pace to relax and soak up a wonderful world while painting its beauty.
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An artist in residence
Playing as an artist who travels to the island country of Eastshade, you set out with an inauspicious beginning, shipwrecked in a cave with only your easel to show for yourself.
Eastshade
Original release date: February 13, 2019
Released on: PS4, Xbox One, PC
Played on: PS5 (via backward compatibility)
However, you have made it to where you wanted to be and soon find yourself in the small settlement of Lyndow having gentle chats with strangers, teaching children to paint, staying in the inn, as well as building up a purse of money through selling feathers, collecting quests, and, importantly, getting your artist’s eye in by painting some vistas.
You’ll travel to a few different areas of the map, each with some small locations to fast travel between, inhabited by the anthropomorphic Eastshadian animal folk, and the gentleness carries on throughout your journey, although you can spice it up with some passive-aggressive or sarcastic answers in conversation if you wish.
Oh, to be a travelling painter
A small map on the whole, but that soon opens up to something that’s a little larger, but that can still be traversed on foot. And doing so is more than worth it, too, as the land is filled with some of the most pleasing landscapes and use of natural planting and landscape elements that I’ve enjoyed in a long time. So much so that I couldn’t help but take some of my own screenshots of the game.
And that’s at the core of what Eastshade does well: it makes taking screenshots the main mechanic of the game to progress, but also to capture moments, places, views, people, chickens, hot air balloons, and complete tasks.
What came out of this simple act, though, was a deep level of care in getting the right, or best, and most fabulous painting composition right for my mysterious commissioners. I would spend ages adjusting the on-screen view to make sure a tree was on the third, or that I’d capture some color from some plants, or get the best view of the daily eclipse to ensure the composition was top-notch.
It’s a charming little game, and I’m very pleased indeed to have found the time to get it out of my backlog and now, with a platinum trophy achieved to boot, in my completed library. It’s not perfect by any means, and is a little buggy here and there with environments that won’t load, or soft-locking save screen, but its undeniable chill factor, and slow pace was just what I needed at a time when life can feel loud, busy, and complicated.
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