~The Game Pass Thread~

The nice thing about It Lurks Below is that a single purchase gets you an installable copy on both Xbox and PC. I think the saves may transfer back and forth between platforms since it is Play Anywhere, but I haven’t had a chance to independently verify that yet.

I tried it out last night and really enjoyed my initial experience. A fun little 2DTerria-like survival crafter game.

The only stumble I had was with settings. I couldn’t get the game screen just right until I switched from Windowed to Full Screen (but I also have a weird monitor).

I know that, at least for cloud play games, any progress you make when playing on the cloud, if you load that game up on your XBox, the progress syncs up.

It’s really pretty well done and seamless.

I’'m liking Eastshade a fair bit. It’s a walking sim/adventure game (there are some puzzles and some inventory items but it’s all very basic and straightforward) set in a idyllic romantic-era setting with anthropomorphic animals, while the player is a painter who wishes to fulfill your dead mother wishes of visit Eastshade and paint four special places.

The game is gorgeous at times, nailing the atmosphere it clearly wanted to convey. In quests you have to paint several vistas, to give the paintings to your clients. To paint, you need inspiration, that you gain doing quests, visiting new places, talking to special characters, and basically living your adventure in Eastshade.
In the game you ride a balloon, you do psychedelic drugs, search for hot springs, find the mystery of the lost architect, solve enigmas, discover a lost tribe, witness special eclipses and much more.

It was one of my favorite games of that year. It has everything I want out of an RPG and none of the boring combat! I did agree with most of the reviews that there was room for the painting part to be more mechanically interesting, given what a focus it is of the concept.

I either forget doing some of these things or had no idea they were in there!

I really enjoyed Eastshade too. It was like someone took Skyrim and just yanked out all the combat, which is exactly the sort of thing I had been looking for.

I gave it a brief try and came away impressed. I remember a kid jumping off a roof which is always fantastic. But I drifted on to other things and haven’t been back. Thanks for the reminder!

Yeah all Cloud games do this between Cloud and Console. They also sync across PC, but generally only if they’re “Play Anywhere”.

Where did this come from? I must have missed it coming to Game Pass.

Searching this thread reveals:

D’oh! I must have been distracted by the release of Deep Rock Galactic and Celeste that week. And a forum search reveals pretty much only Nightguant praising it in several (unrelated) threads.

Console Flight Sim looking good… few days to go.

Cloud games are basically Xbox Series S games that you’re playing elsewhere, so it makes sense.

Their streaming games supposedly run on XSX now.

Some Eastshade images









It is a wonderful looking game, until you get to the animal people. Ugh I just can’t buy into that.

I think that might be in about the first 4 seconds, so I guess you didn’t play long :)

I found it a bit of a slog myself. Gave up around when I was supposed to be getting into the city near the balloon.

What I don’t like about them is the bad lip syncing.

I do have to demerit the game a bit for all the furries. But it didn’t ruin the game for me.

I never bought it, I un-wishlisted after Tom’s stream a few years ago.

I finished it in 7 hours. Then again, 7 hours of just going around , without no combat, it can be a bit of a slog, in special in a pair of quests where you just have to click on lots of npcs to see who is the right person to talk to.

Eastshade is quite remarkable in that, especially for about the first half of the game, anywhere you stand and any direction that you look is nearly always worth painting! There’s always something interesting to see, details that don’t just look like a typical tiled landscape filled with repeating assets. They did the concept proud in that regard.

The animal characters to me are indicative of one thing: They’re an indie studio. If they’d made human characters, it would have required an animation fidelity that they couldn’t afford and, if they came up short, would trigger the Uncanny Valley hard. Triggering Furry Fear (to coin a term) was clearly preferable, and probably the right call. The other alternative is what they did in Tacoma or Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, which clearly also hit the same limitation and found their own way around it. Character animation–and especially facial animation–is a bitch.

I thought I would play Crusader Kings III tonight. I haven’t played it in months. That’s odd; it wants me to install it again. Then, it wants me to delete and reinstall. Okay.

Now, it won’t install. It “gets” to 0% and I get an unhelpful error message. Microsoft says in its “help” page that an optional Windows update from June will solve Game Pass problems. Um, okay, except my installation is up-to-date and, just to double-check, I clicked on “optional updates” and, as I imagined, the update MS says to use isn’t an option.

Forza Horizon as does Rise of Nations still loads, but when I try to install or play other titles, I get sent to the store page for “Gaming Services” which is–you guessed it!–installed already.

I hate Microsoft so much. I love my Xbox, and I hope it ultimately succeeds, but JFC I hate Microsoft so much.

Update: Resetting Gaming Services lets installed games run again. Trying to install CK3 gives a new error message. I think it thinks I’m trying to install it twice. I have an external drive I often use for installations. The first several times I tried to install, it gave me an option for that drive. Now it doesn’t. Yay.