Eastshade
Makes screenshotting an intrinsic part of play.
Do you know who I admire? Anika from Eastshade. Anika lives in a little hut between the port of Lyndow and the city of Nava in the game. She’s obsessed with owls. Can’t get enough of them. When she’s not sitting in her hovel she’s tramping through the ferns making hooting noises.
I, on the other hand, am playing a traveling artist. I came to Eastshade to paint pictures in tribute to my mother via a type of in-game screenshotting. It’s this art focus which sets Eastshade apart from other games which muddle about in high fantasy settings.
The game opens with your character being shipwrecked. You wake up in a cave just outside the tiny port of Lyndow and start to explore, quickly accumulating a to-do list, idly picking up sticks and flowers, and noting how picturesque everything is. You learn how to make canvases out of bits of wood and fabric under the guise of teaching a little kid in Lyndow how to do it.
Painting involves picking a canvas — either a fresh one or a used one you’re happy to paint over. Once you’ve picked your surface you compose the image. This is done by cropping the view you have onscreen using a rectangle guideline. Pressing E paints whatever’s in the rectangle, applying some effects so that what’s shown on an easel, which appears in the world, isn’t a straightforward screenshot, but takes on a painterly quality. Each painting costs inspiration, which you collect by visiting new areas or doing tasks.
Pretty games aren’t unusual, but Eastshade’s design is closer to that of a garden. The buildings feel more like follies than houses, the bridges come straight from Arcadian paintings, and curated lines of sight are key.
The main purpose of the game is to collect four paintings which correspond to your mother’s memories of the place, but in trying to reach those locations you end up following little side stories — a religious conflict involving hallucinogenic tea, a neighborly dispute over whether a guy who keeps getting jars stuck on his head is a good parent, a tiny quest involving a stolen book.
You can use what you gather to brew teas which offer different effects, trade feathers for money, or build a raft or a reed boat to cross the water.
SHE’S A HOOT
Eastshade isn’t huge — I finished in about ten hours — but it is charming. There are memorable characters — Anika and her owl obsession, the ship’s captain who hates you because you don’t understand how much she loved her boat, the night drummers — and the screenshot mechanic is enough of a point of difference that the fairly familiar story setup still feels fresh.
The game crashed a lot, so I’d advise saving frequently. Some of the tasks don’t flow smoothly. I could also do with a few more map markers.
But even with these quibbles, using image capture as part of the game is fascinating. Tying it to a finite resource and making you compose a shot before you paint means you make decisions about what to capture in a different way to normal screenshotting.