Review: Eternal Strands
One of my favourite feelings a game can give me is the one I get when the world I’m in reacts in a way that makes total sense, but is nevertheless unexpected – something I didn’t expect the designers to account for. This could mean pulling off a plan that you didn’t think would actually work, or seeing a situation escalate into total disaster, or somewhere inbetween. Eternal Strands gave me that feeling several times, especially during the opening ten hours – fires spread, walls collapsed, special attacks synced up, some plans worked, and other plans failed in fun ways. Many times I got to experience that mix of surprise and delight.
Eternal Strands is an action-adventure game from a new studio, Yellow Brick Games, set in a fantasy world of magic, dragons, and ancient technology. You play as Brynn, a “weaver”: someone well versed in adventure, capable of journeying into unknown lands to battle monsters. She’ss part of a band of explorers that, in the opening minutes of the game, find their way into the Enclave, a land long thought lost. Brynn and the others need to figure out what’s happened to the Enclave in the years it’s been separated from the world they know, and overcome the hoards of monsters that now roam the land.
Within the opening minutes of the game, Brynn can already attack enemies with a sword, a bow and arrow, and a handful of great magic attacks – you can pick items up with telekinesis to fling them at foes, or freeze them in place with ice before attacking. Naturally, your ability set grows as the game goes on, as do the strength of your weapons and attacks, and as you progress you can develop Brynn into a powerful, versatile character.
Soon, a pleasant loop sets in – you venture out from home base into a level, completing objectives and gathering materials and crafting recipes to get stronger. The objectives you’re sent out to complete are often unexciting – most of them consist of going to a location and collecting an item – but moving through the world and using your powers to fight is the game’s main pull. As you gain new abilities, you discover new ways of using them, too. I found myself routinely setting huge swathes of each level on fire during fights, watching enemies burn up as I tried to outrun the flames myself. I’d lay traps that would lock my enemies in ice if they stepped into them, or use kinetic powers to blast some foes off cliffs and avoid fights entirely, or summon up a helper and pelt my enemies with arrows from a distance. The combat is often frenetic and exciting.
Brynn can climb up any surface and has a generous pool of stamina, which makes exploration a delight – I always enjoyed finding ways to sneak past enemies by climbing onto rooftops, or stumbling upon hidden treasures in obscure places after a good climb. The levels are uniformly gorgeous, and everything runs smoothly – Brynn moves with a fluidity and grace that is rare for a large-scale, independently developed game.
There’s not a lot of variety to the enemies you fight, and as I got further into the game some of the fights started to become monotonous – but even then, I always relished the boss battles. The world is scattered with enormous mechanical creatures, flying dragons and “wyrms” that must be taken down, usually by cutting away armour to expose weak points.
The great joy of these boss fights is that you’re not given direct guidance on the “best” way to take each one down; you can freeze them in place and climb their body to hack away at their weak points from up close, or attack them with your bow from a distance, or throw things at them with telekinesis, or lay traps, or use fire and ice to your advantage. You may need to shift strategies on the fly, and taking these colossal enemies down is always satisfying.
Eternal Strands is, for better and worse, full of signs that it was developed by a small, tight team. It’s a game of grand ambition, but it also features many design elements that start to grate over time. Navigating excessively hot or cold environments is a major part of the game, but the ways to avoid taking damage from fire and ice are limited and slightly obscured.
There are stretches of the game where I got bogged down in excessive conversation, needing to run between different characters in the safe base zone interacting to trigger the next mission objectives – it was a bit too easy to glaze over exactly what they were talking about. As a result, the back half of the game feels a tad directionless compared to the game’s opening.
Eternal Strands,feels like a game that has not been meddled with – one where a talented creative team was able to make the exact game they envisioned, warts and all. There’s a warm glow that emanates from it, and it’s not just all the fires I started across my playthrough – it’s just a bit of a special game.
Eternal Strands is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. A PS5 review code was provided by the game’s PR team.
James O’Connor has been writing about games since 2008. He is the author of Untitled Goose Game for Boss Fight Books.
