PSA: The GOG version seems to be missing achievements and there's no purchasable soundtrack DLC. You can get the soundtrack DRM-free on Bandcamp though.

Interesting - there is a skeleton-ish creature (47 secs into the trailer) but usually Chinese censors are pretty intolerant of this. Since this is a Shanghai based dev, wondering if this is made purely for the western market? Can't imagine restrictions are softening after the 3 hour weekly limit recently placed on gaming over there

It seems to be blocked in China. I can't see the game card, anyway.

Thanks for that information. Just for the sake of the list, could you check if you can reach the game's Steam or EGS pages?

There have been cases before where games have been blocked in China by GOG but they were freely available on other stores...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/977880/Eastward
https://www.epicgames.com/store/de/p/eastward

It isn't blocked on the Steam store, but it's blocked on Epic. Curiouser and curiouser.

Could it be that it is "blocked" not because censorship, but because they have another deal with another publisher especially for China?

It is also blocked in Taiwan.
Not sure whether it is blocked in other regions.

Achievements appeared in GOG GALAXY 2.0 after pre-ordering. Now after the release they are gone. Can anyone explain why?

I thought I had seen them, thanks for the confirmation. There are two options:
1. They are invisible but working, in which case they appear when you unlock them. The developers just need to change a setting in their backend to make them all visible again.
2. The achievements are not yet functional and therefore they have hidden them until they are operational.
You should try to get the first achievement to find out what the reality is.

Thanks a lot for confirming this, and to ChrisSZ and ysbird as well.

I'm afraid I made a mistake with the EGS link, though - the EGS link I posted has the German language code "de" in the URL (I just grabbed the first link I could find and it defaulted to Germany for me). So maybe the EGS blocked you because of that - not sure how the region lock system works on that store (should be IP based regardless of which language you choose, right?)

Unfortunately, this is not the first case of a game being region locked in China on GOG but being available on Steam. You can find more examples on the list - these also include at least one game which is region locked for a bunch of other countries such as Taiwan or Malaysia.

Can someone tell me whether the Steam entry for Eastward mentions a different publisher? On GOG, it's Chucklefish.

Yes, I got a message in German, presumably saying it's not available in my region. (see image)

I then went to the home page of the US store, and searched for 'Eastward', and didn't find it there.

Thanks for checking. The message says exactly that. So it looks like EGS and GOG abide by different rules than Steam for this game...

Kinda worried if I should have bought this, seeing as China just threatened WW3 and it could be seen as funding the enemy. I like the game, but I live in the states and I dunno how they feel about me giving money to China right now considering recent events. Am I just paranoid or should I refund the thing?

If you buy this you're giving money to Chucklefish, who are based in the UK. What happens to the money after that depends on the agreement between Chucklefish and the developers.