• Price: $5.99 USD (currently on sale for $5.09 until February 15th); bundle with full game and DLC $27.79 ($18.06 on sale)
• Developer: Pixpil
• Publisher: Chucklefish
• Release Date: January 31, 2024

Note: This is DLC and not a separate game, so you do need the main game to play this. Be sure to get the DLC that corresponds with the correct region digitally or physically!

Eastward was the first game I ever wrote about on this site almost three years ago. It wasn’t perfect, but I loved the character designs, Earthborn arcade game, and ideas for the story. The plot in the original game was on the darker side, which is why the Octopia farming DLC announcement came as a very welcome surprise.

I really enjoyed the dynamic between precocious Sam and silent parental figure John in the main game. Grogu!Sam and Din Djarin!John DLC when? In this alternate universe, the pair get a chance to settle down in a rundown village, where they’ve purchased some farm land. You’ll need to work hard to restore Octopia to its former glory and attract new inhabitants.

Sam and John’s new home is barebones at first (poor John is forced to sleep on the floor 😢). The main field is a decent size though! John completes the more backbreaking work by tilling the field, and Sam is a good little helper who plants the seeds. I love that we don’t ever have to refill the watering can, and that the axe works on both wood and stone!

The harvesting gloves were a confusing addition, as I’m used to being able to just harvest crops with the A button. Here, you have to switch to the gloves and use Y to harvest them. Similar to the main game, there’s an emphasis on cooking, and as you unlock more crops and ingredients you’ll learn more recipes.

You can eat wherever you want to, but you also have to have dinner every night at home. The dish you consume at dinner restores extra stamina on top of its usual restoration value. (Unfortunately, your stamina isn’t fully restored after going to bed.)

I did find it a little annoying that Sam would always stop work for the day at 8 PM (20:00) to force you to eat dinner, and you can’t go back to work after that. Additionally, you wake up at 8 AM every day instead of the standard 6 AM from most farming games.

It felt like the day would go by too quickly as a result. Perhaps they could have had Sam go to bed after dinner and allowed players to continue work with John by himself? I felt a bit rushed every day due to the time constraints.

The time issue isn’t so bad until you unlock more sections of Octopia, and therefore more to do. There’s a swamp, a beach, and a mountain, which all have new ingredients and things to do. All 3 biomes have fishing spots, and you can unlock a daily mining mini game in the swamp and beach areas.

It took me a while to figure out the mining, and I also had some trouble with the fishing controls, but it’s manageable. You can only catch a limited number of fish from each body of water per day unless you purchase some bait. Fish appear in different colors in the water, which reflect their rarity.

In this game, fish are food, not friends. (Sorry, Nemo!) But you can befriend chickens, pigs, and cows, adding them to your farm family to get their byproducts every day. Your initial facilities aren’t terribly impressive, but you can upgrade space on your farm and reach a point where you have the livestock in actual buildings! (Unfortunately, you don’t get a dog or cat for Sam to have as a pet.)

But before that can happen, you’ve got to start small. You don’t even have a general store at first. (When you do, you can sell things right away at the general store.) Gather enough wood, stone, and salt currency to pay for the construction of new businesses and homes. As you continue to develop the village, more and more familiar faces from the main game will appear! (And Octopia start to look much better.)

The menu displays your current quests: it doesn’t always tell you who will appear, but it indicates what dish you’ll need to make and how long you have to make it. I never actually failed anything because it felt like they gave you plenty of advance notice to prepare for each request. Eventually, you also get to invite people to dinner (which you may miss at first if you don’t notice the option appear alongside the “talk” button).

You can invite multiple groups to dinner, which is nice and wholesome and serves an additional purpose: it unlocks perks such as sped-up construction or new invention ideas. While I was a little disappointed that we don’t get to add decor to the expanded house (Earthborn figures, anyone?), I still was quite happy that this version of Sam and John got a happy ending with a nice home.

It took me a little over 10 hours to get through most of the content; I completed the main storyline and saw the credits roll. After that, you can work on meeting any characters you’ve missed and earning any remaining trophies. Besides the occasional frame rate slowdown, my main issue was probably that the fishing NPCs seemed to constantly prevent others from visiting to finish their storylines. Towards the end I found myself going straight to bed every day to skip to a day with the missing characters.

Octopia does actually improve on a few farming sim elements, though, and this is pretty much everything I wanted for Sam and John to have a pleasant domestic life after viewing the events of the main game/universe. Some of the storyline is just as confusing as that of the main game, but overall I enjoyed the DLC experience and would recommend it if you liked the original.