Eastshade is a beautiful little game. Think any Elder Scrolls game without the magic and the combat and on a much smaller scale. The game succeeds with that, giving you a satisfying sense of exploration in a mystical world, even though its a tiny little island.
You reach the island with the goal to paint the favorite locations of your late mother. To reach those places, you have to help out the locals with a variety of quests, that are written well but are nothing special.
The game looks rough around the edges visually (especially with the characters, they have basically no real animation), but the colorful environment if you set out on foot in the wilderness more than makes up for that.

i was enamored with eastshade from the start. echoes reminiscent of mirrowind and miasmata furthered my curiosity and pushed me through the first bit of gating: the town you wash ashore upon. here you play as a stranger in a strange land, spoken of by your mother, whose memories inspired your trip to the titular destination, eastshade. the thrust of the game is simple: paint four paintings, each one of something that was precious to her.

as a painter you survive and navigate by your trade, and eastshade is built around this. you paint commissions inbetween odd favors to make your way, and this is where the game shines. exploration & character work, with simple systems of gathering and crafting. the game jars at times when all of this intersects and you're reminded you're playing a game: when you suddenly have to pay a toll to cross a bridge, or when you need to get three letters of recommendations to enter a city.

there's an antagonism there in the game, where the idyllic is punctuated by the transactional nature of what you do in the game. but it never felt dishonest. the game peaked for me when i felt like i had broken out beyond the progress gates. when i was being given tools for deeper exploration: the bicycle, the coat, and the rail-line. the greatest joy i had was realizing just how good the bicycle was. the greatest bicycle in games.

unfortunately some terrible save-eating bugs plagued the gamepass release and i lost an immense amount of progress numerous times, even after the patch. these bugs wore down the ability i had to further explore the space and by the time things were sorted, i was already prepared to end the game quickly.

but eastshade, despite all of my woes, impressed me in its final moment. so many games lack a notion of continuity, that what happened took place and made an impact. going home and seeing the letter sent in the mail, of the people you helped, was something special. continuity, continuity, continuity.

Completed with 100% of achievements unlocked (1,000G). A beautiful game with a great concept, Eastshade sees the player taking control of a shipwrecked artist, arriving on a lightly populated island with the intention of commemorating his mother with a set of paintings. Unusual for an adventure game, Eastshade is entirely devoid of combat, instead focusing on exploration of the world with some light questing and puzzle-solving (often requiring paintings of appropriate subjects). The painting mechanic is as simple as framing the image on-screen, so it doesn't allow as much creativity as might be expected, but the artistic theme is still used to good effect in dialog, etc. Inevitably, you're not going to find great excitement from the game, but there's a great sense of character which means that it remains a worthwhile experience.

I really wouldn't have thought I'd like an Elder Scrolls without combat and without "a save the world plot" do much more. Must be because this game actually nails exploration!

The simple premise (you're a painter, who traveled to the Isle of Eastshade to paint the favourite places of their deceased mother) is really nice setup for exloration. You need to find these places to paint them, that's it, but sometimes one thing leads to another involving you in a number of stuff that might be interconnected at times or just helpful for your overall quest.

Side-Quests are really nice, fun, different and intriguing. You'll help an inventor to make her air balloon more popular, be a detective, having adventures while you're high on a kind of tea it's all super fun.

Only two things I don't like/ was sceptical of: as you are free to go everywhere you might end up backtracking a lot if you don't have the right equipment (coat against cold or a reed boat to cross rivers for example) which can get a bit annoying and I'm not to sure how much replay value it has. Cause exploration is a big part of it and I don't know, if I'll have the same kind of experience exploring these (magnificent) areas again.

It's a top tier game though, You definitely shouldn't miss out on it!

my initial impression was high, but it slowly lowered the longer the game went on as i realized this was not Painting: The Video Game, but Another Crafting Game with just occasional painting side-quests. i don't mind walking around in beautiful scenery, but the frustrating combination of slow movement speeds, limited fast-travel, stupid environmental physics, long stretches of quite frankly boring maps to cross, and random crashes meant i often had to redo several parts that left me annoyed and frustrated in the home stretch. (don't believe what the internet says about the game auto-saving often. do it yourself.)

I enjoyed what I played of Eastshade well enough, I like the idea a lot and the visuals are gorgeous if often a bit too Kinkade for my tastes. It made me wonder why there weren't more games in this "Elder Scrolls without the combat" mold already, since it seems like such an obvious idea. No one likes the combat in those games and abandoning that element eliminates a ton of headaches for the game designer to solve. The writing and voice acting are solid and I appreciate that in a game where you compulsively collect plants and stuff, there are plants marked for conservation. That's the sort of thing I feel successfully pandered by.

The thing that stopped me was just that I couldn't tweak it enough to avoid motion sickness, and it took too long to move around to play it in short sessions. If the game were more exciting to my specific tastes I might have pushed through anyone but while I enjoyed what I saw it didn't entice me that much.

I'd like to say that this game is a really sweet, relaxing and touching, but at the end of the day I mostly thought it was boring. The main character is supposed to be a painter, but you don't get to paint at all in the game, you just take screenshots. Which is fine, the environment and world design is genuinely beautiful at times, but just felt ultimately underwhelming. Your actions don't really have any consequences when interacting with NPCs, even when it sometimes feels like they should. And, on top of everything, the game has downright terrible performance on the Xbox One. Frequent bugs and glitches, dropped frames, and crashes causing me to lose save progress multiple times.

I wish the game didn't have these issues, because I think it could have been something enjoyable. The world is interesting, all of the characters are engaging and believable, and the game really is beautiful and heartwarming at times. It's just held back by bugs and certain gameplay decisions that I don't agree with, unfortunately.