A fun but flawed game
Eternal Strands feels like a mash-up of the early Dragon Age games mixed with the floaty sandbox-esque mechanics of Fortnite. Throw in some fantasy story tropes and a colourful, diverse band of misfits and we’ve got ourselves the latest Indie from Yellow Brick Games.
The game is a bit of a hodgepodge of ideas, some that work really well and others that definitely need refinement and polish. The main USP here stems from using the environment around you and harnessing magic to take down giant foes and change the topography of the world around you. It’s a pretty cool concept and in practice, it plays out quite effectively. Seeing the landscape completely ravaged and destroyed thanks to a big fight with a monster adds a dynamism to the world that makes for an incredibly effective and immersive experience.
Alongside the magic, the game also has some pretty good missions, although the Side Quests are poor time-wasters and the core mechanics definitely have some major drawbacks, which we’ll get to shortly.
Set in an original fantasy world brimming with interesting lore, Eternal Strands throws you into the shoes of Brynn, a magic-wielding Weaver who leads a merry band of misfits back into the Enclave to uncover its mysteries when an existential threat looks set to destroy the world.
Its your typical set-up to give the game some purpose, and the plot is quite tropey, slipping into all the modern cliches of the genre along the way. We have the plucky outsider thrown into a leadership role, one of the band potentially working with the enemy and some general miscommunications as well. All of your camp mates are cliched, include tough Smith Sola and nerdy Codex-keeper Laen. There’s also anxious workaholic Casmyn and shy Sev, and all of these characters adopt one or two key attributes and never really grow much across the play-time.
While there is tension between teammates on occasion, it never materializes into anything close to what we’ve seen in games like Mass Effect, where certain characters had massive chips on their shoulder and disrupted the equilibrium of the team.
Midway through the story, Eternal Strands introduces a second base, and while I’m being careful not to spoil anything here, it is worth pointing out that the only human male character in this game is an asshole. And he – along with the big bad of the game – are the only ones inherently evil here. Make of that what you will!
As an RPG, the game has a lot of dialogue and most of this plays out in static scenes featuring pictures of characters, with the voice acting doing all of the heavy lifting. With the exception of the mouths moving slightly, it’s a very basic and somewhat boring way to exposit the story.
Alongside this we also have a very deep Codex, which breaks down numerous parts of the world and the story in more detail, including a very useful guide in how to take out oversized foes. There are also dialogue choices but, as I found out from one of the Loading Screen info pop-ups, they don’t have any bearing on the story whatsoever, and you can’t really play as an outright arrogant, angry or happy protagonist.
Given how detailed this fantasy world actually is, it’s a shame then that the story and dialogue choices don’t feature more urgency. There isn’t really a Point of No Return either, and after you’ve finished the final boss, you’re free to wander around the world again and finish up on anything you may have missed.
So with a rather basic storyline, Eternal Strands’ main hook comes from the gameplay and the magic system. Much like earlier Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, Eternal Strands adopts a main base and then lets you teleport out to different locales in the world via a Loomgate. Each section plays out as a smaller open-world, with unique landmarks, topography and foes to conquer. While you’ll start out with sunny forests and larger open expanses, the game soon progresses into treacherous caverns, dangerous sections with huge drops and even an abandoned fantasy metropolis.
The world is generally quite interesting to navigate and that’s just as well because the game doesn’t have a Fast travel system (outside of chosen spots for Loomgates), nor a robust Waypoint marker. You’ll be doing a lot of running, jumping and climbing in this game and this is where one of the biggest problems rears its ugly head. In the 25 hours I spent playing this, completing every mission and defeating every foe, the biggest issue stems from the stamina bar.
In Eternal Strands, everything requires stamina. Climbing, jumping, slashing, using your bow and running all sap stamina. You have a finite amount to begin with and there’s no way to improve it, with the exception of one armour type which increases the Maximum Stamina. If you run out of stamina, your character will need to stop and catch their breath, walking slowly forward a couple of paces until the bar fills back up.
You do have Vitality Flasks though, which help replenish your HP, and these come in very handy during combat. Trust me when I say, you’ll be using these a lot!
This is a particular problem because if you’re in the middle of climbing, your character will just topple backward and potentially fall to their doom. If you’re fighting an enemy, you’ll just stop and bosses can and will punish you for it. Given a large part of conquering these bosses include climbing over their bodies to find weak spots, this is a particular problem. Even blocking and parrying, which are required to try and hold off brutal attacks, deplete stamina.
While I appreciate the idea here might be to try and manage this better as you play and not just go in all guns blazing, the fact that you can never level this up and improve it makes for a very annoying experience. Every time I found myself getting invested in the world and starting to have some proper fun with the exploration, Eternal Strands would remind me of its biggest hindrance.
Alongside the Stamina, there’s also a bar for your magic too, so you can’t just constantly pummel an enemy with magic. When this depletes, you won’t be able to use your powers until it replenishes again which, to be fair, doesn’t take too long.
The magic system is by far the best part of the game but Eternal Strands never lets you properly go to town with this because of the limited usage holding it back. Again, there’s no way to level this, or any other base stats up in the game outside of equipping specific armour with buffs.
The magic in Eternal Strands falls into three different types. We have Frost, Fire and Kinetic energy, each of which including three different powers that can be unlocked as you play. These magic abilities range from sending out streams of fire to blocking off enemies with ice walls or freezing them in place. As you progress through, you’ll be able to use a Kinetic warp pad to jump at enemies, throw molten fireballs out in a barrage of explosive power and even send out a little fire demon to your bidding for you.
The game lets you experiment and mix-and-match for the most part but you’ll find a system that works for you and largely just use that across the playthrough.
I mentioned before that there’s no way to level up your character and instead, Eternal Strands relies on its resources and crafting system to make your character stronger. Anything you grab out in the world is automatically registered into different categories, which in turn can be fused together to make better weapons or improve your armour. However, the game does have a limited inventory for grabbing gear, so you can’t just grab everything in sight.
Instead, you need to make regular treks back to base camp to deposit your resources. You can try and go deeper into the world but the game adopts a brutal risk/reward system where if you die, you’ll lose some of your resources. One of your teammates, Oria, can save you but she can only grab a limited number of resources each time, and the rest will be lost.
A little further into the story, you do unlock a Warp Point which lets you automatically warp back to camp wherever you are, but there is quite a big time delay in using this and you need to make sure you’re not near enemies when you do because if you hit you, they’ll break your flow and you’ll have to do it again.
The world does change over time as well, with a day/night system that progresses every time you warp around areas. There’s also an extreme weather system with Drought causing Fire to spread like, well, wildfire, while Frost freezes everything around you. Oh yeah, and Frost actually depletes your stamina a lot faster and will slow you down a lot if caught in extreme cold.
These weather effects do work to add a slight element of strategy to traversal or combat, because sometimes you’ll be forced to take a slightly different route or progress in a big detour to try and avoid the worst affected areas. However, the resource system makes things that much harder. There are times where you’ll suffer a cheap death you can’t do anything about. Once, I was flung off a large dragon because I ran out of stamina, and the path I fell happened to be right in the middle of a ravine. I had no way of stopping this and thus lost a lot of resources as a result.
Another time, I got caught within a bunch of Frost, which depleted my stamina completely and, because Ice also damages you over time, killed me because my character didn’t have enough stamina to move out the way.
Given the game doesn’t have a system to let you pick up your gear again when you return, it’s incredibly brutal and at times unnecessarily unfair, especially alongside those stamina and magic cooldowns I mentioned before.
There’s clearly a desire to make magic the centrepiece of this though, because magic does lots more damage compared to using a sword or a bow. In fact, using Weaver’s Grasp is easily one of the most OP moves in the game. This allows you to grab anything in the environment and fling it at enemies. Or you can grab enemies and throw them off a cliff to their doom.
Once you reach the midway point of the game, you’ll quickly realize that combat and killing enemies doesn’t always garner the best resources and isn’t the best way forward. Given how long some fights can go on, especially when you fight tough Surgeborn that can kick your ass and require both magic and swordplay to defeat, throwing enemies off cliffsides and opening chests instead is usually the smarter move. I’m not sure if this was the intent from the devs but it is very satisfying all the same, just to throw these guys into the abyss.
Unlike the band of misfits at your camp, enemies aren’t really that diverse. There’s one type of wolf which is broken up into Shadow/Frost/normal varieties, while there’s also a human enemy, again broken up into the varieties of wielding a Shield, Two-handed sword or an archer. There’s one flying enemy that spits fireballs and an armoured quadruped and that’s about it. Instead, the game’s biggest draw comes from the colossal boss fights.
Drawing inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus, Eternal Strands introduces a variety of different towering foes for you to take out. These are easily the highlight of the entire game and there’s two different ways to defeat them. The first requires you to slash at glowing areas or different sections on these creatures’ bodies to damage them. You can’t just go for the same area though as it’ll eventually harden and force you to climb about the body like Spider-Man to find the next section you can hack at.
Of course, your stamina will deplete the entire time, and enemies will try to shake you off which (you guessed it!) uses stamina to try and hold on.
However, the more unique mechanic, and something that’s needed to level up your powers, comes from Harvesting these foes. Each enemy requires a very specific way of beating them, and that can stem from removing all the armoured plates to reveal a weak point, or even burning an enemy’s mane. Trying to work out how to defeat these foes (alongside using the handy Codex) is one of the best parts of the whole game. It never got boring defeating these foes and you’ll look forward to fighting them every time. They’re exhilarating, enemies have a ton of different moves, and you’ll need to use a variety of different magic to try and come out in one piece.
The other draw here stems from the crafting, which is pretty good although it’s not without its flaws. Back at camp, you’ll have an array of different “Stations” you can use, ranging from Dahm upgrading your magic with Harvested magic, to Laen unlocking Codex Entries. However, Sola’s Forge is where you’ll spend the majority of your time. Using resources, you can craft weapons with stronger attack power, better cold or heat resistance, and lower weight ratings. The lower the weight, the less stamina you’ll use while swinging your weapon about.
It’s a simple system but it’s annoying that you can’t compare your different equipment here. You may have made an amazing sword with great Attack Power, but as you can’t compare it with what you currently have equipped at the Forge, you’ll need to speak to Casmyn at her station to do that. Alongside new weapons, there is a Reforging mechanic here, allowing you to take out one or two Resources from one of your current weapons and replacing them with a stronger and rarer resource.
Speaking of Casmyn, speaking to her will allow you to turn your old resources into Camp Supplies. Camp Supplies can then be used to Upgrade different sections of the camp to make your life easier. Oria can save more resources when you die, Sola can help upgrade your weapons to higher levels etc.
The Side Quests allow you to get to know your companions in more detail but all of these are simple busywork. There’s not a lot of variety to them and toward the end of the game, the missions are actually quite annoying. One starts off with talking to two characters in the camp, needing to go back and forth between the two. They’re at opposite ends and while this is only a little walk, it’s it’s these sort of time-sapping moments that add to the little aggrievances that this game never shakes off.
Graphically, the game has a pretty nice aesthetic, although the contrast on the fire effects, especially when the world is bathed in red, feels very harsh. This is especially prevalent when you get back to base camp and find the place absolutely smothered in red. This is something that definitely could have done with some tweaking. The first time I experienced this I actually thought it was a glitch in-game, but when it happened a few times, I found out that it’s actually a weather effect.
The game’s performance overall is quite good, although there are definite times where the framerate drops considerably when there’s a lot going on. I played on pS5 so this may not be the case for PC gamers with higher-end specs, but it’s definitely something worth bearing in mind. The draw distance isn’t too bad though and the colours are, generally, decent across the board. The camera can be a bit of a menace while you’re climbing over the giant bosses though, especially when they’re walking about and you’re not quite sure what direction you’re actually climbing in.
Despite it being a bit rough around the edges, Yellow Brick Games definitely have something here though. The core mechanics and the way the physic system feeds into the larger world is great. The towering foes are glorious and you’ll be itching to fight more of these across your playtime.
Unfortunately, the core mechanics of the game are hampered by the stamina bar, the lack of conventional levelling and combat that never feels all that rewarding compared to using magic. The story isn’t really anything to write home about either, with a cookie-cutter antagonist and clichéd, one-note companions. However, the hand-drawn cartoony cutscenes are pretty good.
Eternal Strands has a few nice ideas and tons of potential with its robust magic system. The giant boss fights are a definite stand-out but all of this is hampered time and again by basic gameplay design that usurps the fun. In an effort to try and add in this magical physics system, the trade-off is very limited stamina, big magic cooldowns and an inability to level up base stats.
That’s before mentioning some of the performance issues and pretty mindless side quests to pad the run-time. There are elements here that make Eternal Strands a super fun game, but after completing everything this one has to offer across its 25 hour run-time, it’s a disappointingly mixed experience overall, which is a real shame.
Eternal Strands releases worldwide on 28th January 2025!
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