Nostalgia is powerful magic, and no group is quite so woozily under its spell as those who make, sell and play videogames. Our passions for Nintendo, Sega and all the rest were first inflamed in childhood; it seems possible – inevitable, even – for a person to spend the remainder of their life attempting to recapture the feelings of those formative holidays, sat cross-legged in flickered thrall to the TV set. A moment to consider the numbers involved here in 2021, though. The videogame pixel-art ‘revival’ is now sufficiently old that Fez et al are, to some teenagers, the seminal sources – not the older works from which their makers drew.
Where does that leave Eastward, a game whose title is a subtle play on 1994’s Earthbound – and whose substance is, to invoke a cliché of its own, a studious love letter to Shigesato Itoi’s seminal Super Nintendo RPG and the 2D Zelda games of that era? The bald fact is that only players approaching their 40s could have played the games Eastward draws from as children. Younger people will only recognise its influences from YouTube playthroughs or, perhaps, costly eBay scavenger hunts. To them, as the kids might say, Eastward hits differently, and must stand on its own merits, unsupported by the critical buffs of nostalgia.