If you like taking artistic screenshots in games, then Eastshade is exactly the game for you.

You are an artist who fell into a creativity blockade and to get out again, you visit the island of Eastshade, birth place of your mother, to get new inspiration. The main game consists of you painting pictures by freely choosing the size and orientation of the frame, aligning your view & then taking the picture. These pictures are then used to solve most of the quests in this game. People request that you paint their business for advertisement or somebody wants a picture of their hometown before they leave it. It feels a bit like a pacifistic Elder Scrolls game, because every corner had some quest for you and you want to explore more. I took more than a few pictures just for myself because I liked the composition.

In order to paint you need a canvas and inspiration, which is a resource you get from finding beautiful views, hearing interesting stories or drinking a nice relaxing cup of tea. In this way the game play loop is nicely interwoven with the players desire to explore without making it possible to simply spam the “create picture” button.

The whole game was around 12 h for me and I enjoyed every minute of it. The wholesome atmosphere is a nice contrast to the all to common violence in so many other games. It is the only pacifistic Open World game that comes to my mind. And the music is also really great.

And they even included the possibility of accessing your in game pictures, they are in a special folder on your PC (but only those currently in your possession, if you give one away, it’s not in there any more). While this is a wonderful feature, it also contains my only criticism: the resolution of the pictures is sadly really low. So while you can access your pictures in a folder on your PC, it’s not high enough quality to use as background or anything similar.