Eastshade is a charming little RPG game about painting. Shipwrecked on a mysterious island of humanoid animals you communicate with the locals, create paintings for commissions, find new areas, and craft a variety of items to make money and find a way off the island.
Throughout the game there are a number of easter eggs, odd quests, and other things you can do that might not be apparent on a standard playthrough. So here’s a list of 10 things that you can do in this painting RPG, that often don’t have anything to do with painting.
10 Steal Candles
In a game about helping out others and painting your surroundings, it’s unclear why you would feel the need to steal other people’s candles. You can’t sell them and they don’t serve much of a purpose in-game. Yet not only is it possible to steal candles from homes and inns, the game actually encourages it by making it an achievement called Candle Thief.
There are 31 candles throughout the areas that can be stolen and everyone needs to be pilfered to obtain the achievement. Some are found only at night when the homeowner puts it out for much needed night, which makes stealing them that much more awkward.
9 Fly
Admittedly this isn’t an option naturally found within the game, but through the use of console commands, players can give themselves the ability to fly. This ability is incredibly useful in a world full of beautiful vistas and interesting things to see. With the gift of flight, players can view things from different and unique perspectives that wouldn’t be possible in the game, and they can capture those views with a painting.
It goes without saying that this is recommended on a second playthrough of the game as it would be a cheat for regular playthroughs, but for someone wanting to simply enjoy the world and what it has to offer flying is the way to go.
8 Tear A Family Apart
With such a lighthearted game it’s strange the developers would include such a heartbreaking and potentially traumatic ending for a quest. It starts with a deer character who has a jar stuck on his head and needs help getting it off. During the quest, players can dig up some dirt on the character that reveals he may not be the greatest of fathers.
The player can then confront the father about his abilities as a parent and gets hit for it. The incident is reported to the police chief and the mother leaves her husband taking the child with her. You can find the deer lying on the floor of his home devastated. It’s a dark moment and deviates from the rest of the game’s tone.
7 Hang Paintings In Your Home
After beating the game and sailing away you find yourself in your home on the mainland with a few paintings on the wall and notes from Eastshade’s residents giving you updates on events or reminiscing about your time there.
A cool feature that’s frustratingly lacking but is achievable through the console is to put any of the paintings you’ve created on the walls however you like. These bright and brilliant paintings of that mysterious island breathe life into your otherwise barren home and can really make it look nice. It’s possible the developer has gone back and added this feature in because it seems like an oversight for a game centered around painting and beauty.
6 Solve A Crime
If players take a raft out to the middle of a lake by Blushwood Forest they’ll find the Sinkwood Inn where players will have the opportunity to chew on their pipes and do some good old fashioned detective work. Apparently one of the guests has stolen a book and the innkeeper needs you to get to the bottom of this caper and find out who committed the crime.
Like the rest of the game it’s fairly light-hearted, but an interesting break away from painting your surroundings and crafting items. It also rewards players with the reed boat, which is a useful mode of transportation for the rest of the game.
5 Help Two Bears Fall In Love (Or Not)
One of the quests in the game has you gather some information for a bear who has a crush on another bear in the community. Successfully completing this quest will enable the two bears to come together and build a relationship present in the rest of the game.
Interestingly there’s also the possibility of players absolutely butchering things by intentionally keeping the bears from meeting. The romantic fires are never kindled and the two characters spend the rest of the game apart, never knowing what could have been. It’s possible the developer is imparting some kind of lesson here, but it is a little disturbing knowing your actions could either bring two people together or doom them to live alone wondering what could have been.
4 Change Your Perspective
One of the more interesting mechanics in the game is how necessary tea is. In order to paint things you need to keep your inspiration meter filled which requires various activities like listening to music or finding new areas. Drinking tea also has a way of giving your character inspiration.
Some brews also have some interesting side effects that change how your character views the world by changing colors, making things sharper or blurry, and so on. Most teas introduce slight changes to the world, but a few will completely warp it into a scene from an alien world that makes you wonder if it was really tea that you just drank.
3 Dream Tripping
Speaking of tea there are a few brews that will actually take you to an alien world in your dreams. The brews Blue Dream Tea and Silver Dream Tea advertised as drinks that will prevent you from getting a restful nights sleep will project the player to bizarre landscapes.
One has an area of floating rocks and a large stone gazebo with mountains and a waterfall that drops off into nothing, to escape you must chop a tree with an ax. The other is a vast ocean broken up by stone archways and large boulders. To escape this one you have to jump upon pillows forming a path in the water to a massive waterfall where you plummet until you wake up. Needless to say there's definitely something in the tea in this game.
2 Rescue A Shipwrecked Family
This island definitely needs a working lighthouse, shortly after you’re shipwrecked a father and his two young children are shipwrecked on another part of the island. The father is still stuck on the wreck and you have to craft a rope in order to save him. After towing him to shore he reveals his children are missing and pleads with you to find them. The two tykes are found some distance away huddled under a makeshift lean-to.
It’s a cool moment for an otherwise peaceful painting game and makes you feel like a hero, but only if you have the most recent version of the game. Early editions had a bug that prevented you from finding the children and you could never unite them with their father. You were then forced to move along leaving a distraught father wondering where his kids are and two children huddled in a shelter scared and alone.
1 Complete Commissions Any Way You Like
The mechanics of the game allow you to hold up a frame and then create a painting of whatever you have in that frame. It’s a cool feature that gives you the freedom to capture unique views and interesting perspectives. Some players may not be aware that this applies to the paintings you’re commissioned to paint as well.
If the character wants a painting of a tree for instance you have a ton of freedom to get a painting of any tree from any view from any distance. Instead of just finding the nearest tree and painting it centered on the canvas, you can travel across the island and paint a unique tree you found earlier or you could paint it from a hilltop some distance away, or use some of those teas discussed in an earlier entry to get a unique painting. The requirements are very broad and you’re left with a lot of freedom in how you complete the commissions, so get creative.