Developer: Yellow Brick Games
Publisher: Yellow Brick Games
Platform: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Tested on: PC
Eternal Strands – Review
Eternal Strands is the debut single-player fantasy action-adventure game from Yellow Brick Games, a new independent developer founded by industry veterans. This sets a bar of expectations that can be held against Eternal Strands, which focuses on facing giant enemies. Let us see if the game clears the bar it sets for itself.
Story
In Eternal Strands, we play Brynn, a Weaver who tries to uncover the secrets of what happened to her cultural homeland. Weavers are people with magical abilities who used to live in the Enclave, a powerful center of mystical wonders. However, the Enclave sealed itself after a mysterious event called the Surge destroyed the country, which also caused Weavers to become shunned by society. Because of this, they usually band together; the same is true for Brynn. She recently joined a new group and is setting out to discover the ‘Veil, ‘ the magical barrier around the Enclave.
Once the setting has been established, we follow the story of Brynn and her companions as they explore the Enclave, the first people to do so in a long time. During this quest, we learn more about the story of the Weavers and the Enclave while simultaneously getting closer to our fellow Weavers. The only major downside to the story, which is complex and compelling, is that it is a very slow burn. Especially in the earlier half of the game, the focus is more on slogging through the main and side quests to get all the various stations working in the camp before you can start getting to know the world and your companions. These companions are all very fleshed-out with their unique personalities, which makes getting to know them a joy.
Graphics
The art in Eternal Strands is simply breathtaking! The game uses a nice, detailed, and vibrant 3D art style that matches the art used during 3D cutscenes. This colorful palette highlights the omnipresence of magic in the world around you. Despite the high saturation and the color variance, some monsters can blend in with the background, especially when they are further away for some cutscenes. During interactions with your companions where dialogue is necessary, the game switches to a charming, anime-adjacent 2D style with cutouts of the characters that light up when they are speaking. This 2D art style is also adhered to for longer cutscenes where you have longer 2D animated cutscenes.
Outside of these ‘peaceful’ situations, Eternal Strands’ graphics also hold up during combat. Even with plenty of fire and frost effects, each producing its unique particle effects, the game runs smoothly without issue.
Sound
If Eternal Strands‘ graphics pass a high bar, its sound design positively leaps over it. Austin Wintory, known, for example, from Assasin’s Creed Syndicate and Journey, does an outright amazing job here. The melodies of the open world add to the enchantment of the graphics, while dynamic changes help you get an overview of everything happening on the screen even before you see it. The soundtrack also has a high amount of ‘Fantasy’ energy, which adds to the feeling that you are experiencing an unknown, magical world.
Gameplay
Eternal Strands‘ gameplay is based around a simple concept: the world is your weapon. This simple statement forms the basis of every option and possibility in the game, including even the item crafting process. At its core, it is still an action-adventure game, which means the brunt of your time will be spent running around, fighting enemies, and collecting materials. The game is divided into areas that are all connected through fast-travel locations. While doing quests, dying will allow you to save some materials and put you back at the entrance of the area you were in. This will enable you to collect materials even while stuck in a quest without always immediately returning to the hub area. In the hub area, you can interact with your companions, complete missions, use materials to upgrade your companions’ workshop, and change your loadout for different pieces of equipment.
You start with your essential list of equipment and can gain better equipment in two ways: you can find recipes while exploring the Enclave or reforge your existing items. Both methods will require materials, but the unique twist is that recipes only require different types of items, leaving you to decide which specific items you wish to use. This choice seems trivial but can impact the bonuses you receive from the items and add some special modifiers based on which items you used. By doing this, you can create various versions and levels of the three available weapon types and the six available armor sets. The downside is that for all of these items and their alternative versions, you need to use items to level up the crafting stations substantially and gather even more resources, which causes you to spend a lot of time on resource gathering.
These weapons and armor help you specialize your playstyle, as they use different abilities and buffs. Weapons can be freely rotated while you are out exploring, allowing for on-the-fly experimenting, but you must return to the base camp whenever you wish to change your outfit. These outfits are great because they allow you to stack various buffs based on which pieces you are wearing. Sadly, the game doesn’t allow you to save specific combinations, meaning that you always have to rebuild your armor from scratch.
The final customization for your style also aligns with the ‘the world is your weapon’ concept. As stated earlier, Brynn is a Weaver, a person who can use magic and supports her weapons with magic. These magic powers, called ‘Strands,’ can be gained from enemy bosses and are upgraded with consecutive kills. These powers are divided into Cold, Fire, and Kinetic. Whereas Fire explains itself as a damage-focused magic type, Kinetic and Cold focus more on utility. Kinetic allows you to draw enemies together and throw items at them. At the same time, Cold can create bridges and temporarily freeze enemies solid. These magic types all interact with the world around you in different, unique ways, and while your mana is limited, you can switch between magic types with the push of a button.
All of these options culminate together to allow you as a player to create a combat style that is perfectly tailored to you: high damage to burst through enemies or focused on crowd control and slowly whittling away at your enemies. The combat in Eternal Strands is dynamic, but smaller enemies quickly become predictable and feel more like a chore. It is only with the giant bosses that the game truly shines. These bosses are divided into unique parts, allowing you to test your abilities and independently focus on and exploit weaknesses. These bosses are delights to fight and more than make up for all the resource-gathering and smaller enemies that take up a lot of your time.
Conclusion
While not hitting every shot they make, Yellow Brick Games gave us a gem with Eternal Strands. With a rich story, myriad customization options, improvisational combat, big bosses, and many things to upgrade around your base of operations, the game packs something for everyone. Most importantly, it does all of this without diminishing the quality of its graphics, making Eternal Strands a fantastic action-adventure title for players who enjoy the more magical and anime-esque side of the genre.
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