A few years ago, a cute new action-adventure game called Eastward released on most platforms, blending some appealing EarthBound-esque visuals with a narrative-driven game loop that’s vaguely reminiscent of the older Zelda games. We really enjoyed it, despite its flaws, and it seems that developer Pixpil had some more ideas it wanted to explore for the unique world it built, as it’s now released a sizable DLC called Eastward: Octopia. This siloed expansion adds a lot more than just a few new levels and scenes, effectively acting as a half-sequel of sorts that completely changes up the gameplay. We’d even go so far as to say that it’s a superior game to the original.
Octopia’s narrative takes place in an alternate universe separate from the main timeline of Eastward; in this world, things are decidedly cheerier and brighter, while there isn’t a hint of miasma to be found anywhere. The story kicks off with Sam and John arriving by train at a mysterious place called Octopia, an abandoned amusement park that’s long since fallen to ruin. The two purchase a small house and a plot of land there to start afresh, and set out to rebuild Octopia to its former glory through their farming efforts. Plenty of alternate-universe counterpart characters from the main plot of Eastward eventually move there to join them in this endeavor, but everyone is just a little different in this iteration.
We won’t spoil too much, but it’s heavily implied that the narrative eventually ties back in with Eastward’s main story, though newcomers don’t necessarily need to know the full story to get the most out of Octopia. For the most part, this is a simple, cute tale about a growing rural community coming together to build their home, but those of you who played through the full story of the main campaign will notice some details and easter eggs that indicate a closer connection. Most importantly, the narrative here is decidedly less verbose than the base game, and this much stronger focus on pacing is a welcome improvement.
Gameplay in Octopia diverges quite a bit from the narrative-driven, Zelda-esque structure of the main game, replacing it instead with some good old-fashioned farm sim mechanics. Each day is just over ten minutes long, and you keep John and Sam busy with activities like tending to your animals and tilling your soil, while reinvesting the profits from the goods you sell in town into upgrades for your property and more seeds to plant. What you do with your day is left largely up to you, there’s no rush, but unlocking more upgrades and getting more people to move to town is gated by fulfilling requests by townsfolk for construction projects or meals you can cook for them.
Like most farm sims, Octopia starts out a little slow, but it doesn’t take long for you to fall into a nice rhythm as you start setting short and mid-term goals and diligently accomplishing them. Once things start to open up more and you have more residents in the town, tasks start to pick up quite a bit to the point where it almost feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day. Yet no matter what you choose to focus on, you’re always nicely rewarded for your efforts, creating a wonderful sense of progression as you watch the ramshackle town slowly turn into a place that feels more like home.
To help break up the repetition of farm tasks somewhat, Octopia also features minigames that offer a bit of gameplay variety. Fishing, for example, tasks you with ‘chasing’ fish around the perimeter of a pond with your fishing pole’s bobber, with rarer fish having more deft and swift swimming patterns to evade capture. In another example, you can extract rare ore from a mine by sending down a cutesy remotely-operated drone, which you navigate around caves by playing an old-school arcade game that tasks you with dropping bombs to loosen deposits and unlock deeper floors. We appreciated the gameplay diversity offered in Octopia—it isn’t overwhelming, but there are just enough activities to avoid things getting too repetitive.
The visuals were always one of the highlights of the original Eastward, and we’re happy to report that their quality has not dipped in the slightest for this expansion. The detailed spritework and animation is some of the best in the business, doing a great job of showcasing each character’s unique personality and quirks. Meanwhile, the bright, cozy environments feel right at home with the farm sim aesthetic, while the later biomes you unlock and visit help to add some nice graphical diversity. It’s tough to say whether Octopia looks better than the base game, but at the very least it continues to set the bar for what a hi-bit 2D art style can accomplish.
Octopia isn’t without some relatively minor issues. One important problem is that there are some noticeable performance hiccups to contend with. We had a few times where the game completely crashed on us, wiping out any progress that we made on that day, and we noticed occasional but sudden frame drops that can cause you to lose a fish or cause John and Sam to jump forward a few steps when tending their crops. The frame drops aren’t too detrimental given the overall slow pace of the gameplay, but they are a persistent annoyance that dragged down the experience a bit.
There are also some missing quality-of-life features that make Octopia a clunkier experience compared to its genre contemporaries. For example, when you’re cooking dishes—one of your main sources of income—there’s no option to mass produce multiples of a dish if you have a lot of ingredients and want more than one, so you’re forced to navigate the menu and reselect the dish repeatedly to make one at a time. Such issues don’t enormously affect the experience, but little things like this can add up to disrupt the gameplay flow, especially during extended sessions.
And though this is less of a direct criticism, we’d like to highlight that Octopia is only available to those who have bought Eastward first, confusingly. Despite being effectively a complete, self-contained, 15-20 hour farm sim, this isn’t available for separate purchase like other standalone DLCs such as Demon Turf: Neon Splash or Shovel Knight: King of Cards. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it may come as a disappointment for some; not only is Octopia overall a more enjoyable experience than the base game, but at the price of only six bucks, it’s a steal when you consider all the content it has to offer.
Conclusion
Eastward: Octopia may not bring many new ideas to a crowded genre, but this is an impressively well-executed expansion that nicely ticks all the boxes for a satisfying and relaxing farm sim. Although it has some rougher edges, the decent gameplay variety, interesting story, gorgeous visuals, and surprising amount of content all come together to make this one an easy recommendation to any fans of the original Eastward. Even for those of you who fell off your playthrough of the original for one reason or another, we’d encourage you to consider coming back for Octopia—this is a much better-paced game and, some performance issues aside, it’s lost none of the charm that made the original so popular.
Comments 28
Wow. A DLC that's entirely a new universe. Didn't expect that.
I couldn't make it through the base game due too much dialogue. So I'll give this a go for sure!
Picked up both Eastward and Eastward: Octopia but only because both were on sale.
I'm enjoying both but I feel Octopia should've been its own standalone release.
Octopia having little to do with the original game negates the necessity of tying the two together.
Eastward isn't a new title on Switch, and so I fear that now the Game Trial and sales have ended, requiring newcomers to make two separate purchases to play Octopia is only going to hurt its sales potential in the long run
Man, I'm not a farm sim fan, but I love Eastward, and would like to support the devs. Plus, this is only 5 bucks right now! How can I say no?
@Folkloner
It also seems funky to me that Octopia isn’t a standalone release. My partner enjoys farming sims, but there is no way she’d enjoy the original game. Maybe the developer can separate the games in the future?
Bought it on release day but I've had no time to play since. Luckily starting it today, loved the base game.
It feels strange it's a dlc rather than a standalone release, but surely price could have been pretty higher so... I'll not complain 😌
@Solomon_Rambling I think it being tied to Eastward is part of why they were able to price it so cheaply. If they ever do release it as a standalone game, I'd guess the price would go up a bit, too.
Haven't played Eastward yet, but I'm interested in eventually playing it and even more so this DLC considering it's arguably better than the main game - fingers crossed most if not all of its performance problems will be fixed through patches at some point!
I actually liked Eastward. It's seems like quite a while since I played it now and completely forgot this was coming out.
It does certainly read like an Eastward 2 rather than an Eastward DLC which is a good thing.
I am quite picky about life and farm sims. It's not really my genre but the ones I have played can be gaming soul devouring so i will defo give this a download at some point soon.
Cheers for the write up/review as always.
Is there any fighting or strictly pacifist?
@SwitchVogel Yeah, that's almost certainly true, and that's absolutely a plus for Eastward owners. The trade-off is that for those who don't own Eastward, the cost 'is' high since you need to own both - and if you're only interested in Octopia, then the perceived value is lower still.
We have seen some sales on Switch that were discounted 'if' you already owned another title from the same developer/publisher.
Perhaps Pixpil should've offered Octopia standalone at a higher price for newcomers, with a discount for those that already owned Eastward. That flexibility would've been better I feel.
@ChHa No combat. There's a bit of exploration, but it's 90% just chill farm stuff.
@Folkloner I completely agree, it feels a little weird that something this substantial is kept exclusive to the base game. Like, I get that it's a DLC, but given how different it is from the original and how it targets a mostly different demographic, I'd think this would reach a wider audience if they released it as its own thing. Especially given that farm sims are really in vogue right now. Though frankly, I'd say Octopia is still well worth the price even factoring in the cost of the base game.
Such a shame this isnt its own release. I just beat eastward towards the end of last year on gamepass but now its been removed from the service. Dont want to have to buy the base game just to play the dlc.
Not usually a farm sim guy but it would be nice to get some milage out of Eastward as I couldn't get past the first couple hours ..so much text and like back and forth walking and talking some more and like 10 mins of gameplay... So hearing this expansion has a lot less "story" makes me want to give this a shot... Nice to see this happening more and more games dropping dlc that's different from the main game like God of War Ragnarok with its roguelike mode
@JohnnyMind If you are okay with 90% of the game being nothing but dialogue you might have a good time.
Eastward isn't a bad game per say. Just an attempt to make the world seem alive via npc's, they neglected to give you the player freedom to explore much of it.
You spend more time reading than anything else. If you are okay with that, you might be in for a good time.
This should have been its own release. It's miles ahead of the base game simply because it isn't bogged down in bad dialogue. It easily could have appealed to the farming/crafting/cozy/whatever audience. Releasing it as DLC is going to halve your potential consumer base right off the bat.
I wanted to like Eastward, I really did, but in the entirety of the first section before traveling to the 2nd area there was barely anything in the way of actual gameplay.
There was a brief mini game, and then the underground tunnel which didn't contain much gameplay either.
The game is beautiful, but even the story wasn't likeable enough to keep me playing. Maybe I went into it uninformed, but from what I had seen prior to playing it made it seem like it could be a top down action adventure, not unlike Zelda in some ways but with a bigger emphasis on story. In the end, the game just isn't for me but that certainly doesn't mean it's a bad game.
This is just another reason I still use GameFly. You know, that service from the olden days, when games and movies shipped via the post office.
I tell ya, youngins these days and their whatchamacallit games. Was it digitated, no digitized, err, digital games, whatever, keep off my grass!
@Kang81 Oh man. I was half way in Act 3 and my game became bugged. Had no backups. I just couldn't anymore at that point.
The idea of sitting through all that bad dialogue again. Eastward is one the rare times a game broke me.
The dialogue in Eastward is nowhere near as bad as some make it out to be, it get's a little wordy at time, but in general it's well written... and that coming from someone who can't stand too much story in video games.
@JackieCMarlow It's not bad. It's just too much and not very well written. The amount of time you spend talking heavily outnumbers the time you spend playing.
The thing is, it's doesn't need that much dialogue. Scenes go on for far longer than they need too. Alot of that dialogue could be trimmed.
The dungeons and puzzles are so easy and short. It's like the devs enjoyed the writing more than they did fleshing out the gameplay.
A good example is the first 3 chapters. You can forgive chapter 1, because it's trying to introduce to its it world.
Chapter 2 comes, and the game for some reason comes to an abrupt hard stall. And for what? An unnecessary long and awkward love story, where none of the humor lands because the joke outstays it's welcome.
It's awkwardly paced and poorly written because it comes out of nowhere and adds nothing to overall narrative. It's random. Too random. It doesn't help that your protagonist is sitting there in awkward silence the whole time.
Again, the writing isn't bad. It's mediocre. It's hard to stay engaged when alot of the writing just meanders. It's hard to stay engaged when the sense of urgency comes to hard a stop for no reason.
A reviewer said it best "There are two lines where one would do, and one line where none would do."
There is no balance with the game. That would be fine, but trailers give off the impression you are in for an action rpg experience. What it fails to convey is that's only a tiny percent of what you'll actually experience.
All these things could be forgiven if the writing was trimmed. But, since there is so much of it, that mediocrity is on full display, and that's all one can notice.
@Vexx234 7/10 too much dialogue
@gabrigoes Haha, but more like an 8/10. Visuals look awesome, soundtrack is good.
it loses points for excessive dialogue, and meh gameplay.
Hope Eastward 2 improves all that.
I absolutely loved Eastward. There was a bit too much dialogue, but it was well-written, and every other aspect of the game was amazing. Looking forward to playing Octopia.
@Quiet2down If that's the case then I probably won't mind it or at least not as much as others did, thanks for telling me!
EASTWARD is a terrible game. I was hyped for it and it was BORING and the gameplay whack! Literally frying pan whack. Resurrecting the beautiful pixel art farm simulator is a NAH for me personally. For those who liked it fair enough. It wasn’t for me or lived up to its hype.
I wasn't motivated enough to finish the base game. I liked the setting and premise initially, but everything drags on for way too long. I thought the story would pick up and the gameplay would expand more once you leave the underground, but it doesn't. If anything it slows down further. I think this DLC would be up my alley and sounds great, but I might be too burned from the base game to go back and revisit the world even with more entertaining gameplay.
@Vexx234
Oh that sucks! I don't blame you, it was hard enough to go through the dialogue the first time and I never played past the 1st section.
@Gameboyy
Not being for you or living up to the hype doesn't make it a terrible game....
@Rosona it was a terrible game in my humble opinion and my gaming experience didn’t improve. It never lived up to the hype. I never finished it due to the weak story and gameplay. The only thing that I loved most was the pixel artwork. It was stunning. Great if you liked it. But it’s a terrible game.
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