I didn’t expect this relaxing game where you play as a traveling painter to relax me, but now I can’t stop painting ruins, landscapes and windmills.

Chill, walking and traveling painter simulation game Shadow East has been in my backlog for a while now. If I remember correctly, it’s because I found mention of wonderful virtual landscapes at a time when I was writing about this aspect of games.

Today, years later, I finally managed to enter the world of EastShadow and I fully embraced my role as a guest painter for hire, with the intention of fulfilling the final requests of their late mother.

It’s a simple game in a small world, but its sweet freshness was perfect to discover, seven years after its initial release. After a frenetic and action-packed game of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Shadow East was a welcome change of pace to relax and soak up a wonderful world while painting its beauty.

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An artist in residence

Playing as an artist who travels to the island country of Eastshade, you leave with an inauspicious start, shipwrecked in a cave with only your easel to show for yourself.

However, you have arrived where you wanted to be and soon find yourself in the small village of Lyndow, chatting nicely with strangers, teaching children to paint, staying at the inn, as well as accumulating a purse of silver by selling feathers, collecting quests and, most importantly, attracting your artistic eye by painting views.

You’ll travel to a few different areas of the map, each with small locations to quickly travel between, inhabited by the anthropomorphic animal people of Eastshadian, and the cuteness will continue throughout your journey, although you can spice it up with passive-aggressive or sarcastic responses in conversation if you wish.

Oh, to be a traveling painter

A small map overall, but which quickly opens up to something a little larger, but which can still be explored on foot. And it’s worth it, too, because the grounds are full of some of the most pleasing scenery and use natural plantings and landscape features that I’ve long enjoyed. So much so that I couldn’t help but take some of my own screenshots of the game.

And that’s at the heart of what Shadow East works well: taking screenshots is the game’s main mechanic for progressing, but also for capturing moments, places, views, people, chickens, hot air balloons and completing tasks.

What emerged from this simple act, however, was great care taken to obtain the right, or best and most fabulous, composition of paint, suitable for my mysterious patrons. I would spend hours adjusting the view on screen to make sure a tree was on third, or capturing the color of certain plants, or getting the best view of the daily eclipse to ensure the composition was top-notch.

It’s a lovely little game, and I’m very happy indeed to have found the time to get it out of my backlog and now, with an earned platinum trophy to boot, into my completed library. It’s not perfect by any means, and there are a bit of bugs here and there with environments not loading, or a soft-locking save screen, but its undeniable relaxation factor and slow pace were exactly what I needed in a time when life can seem noisy, busy, and complicated.

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Rob is the Editor-in-Chief of TechRadar Gaming and Streaming, a video game journalist, reviewer, editor and writer, and has years of experience from multiple publications. Prior to being editor-in-chief of TechRadar Gaming, he was deputy editor of TRG and a long-time member of GamesRadar+, serving as editor-in-chief for hardware there for years, while serving a short stint as a games editor at WePC just before joining TechRadar Gaming. He is also a writer on technology, gaming hardware and video games, as well as gardens and landscapes, and has been writing about virtual landscapes in games for years.