One of my favorite parts of checking out new indie games is seeing all the different ways developers can flex their creative muscles free from corporate shackles. I love when games blend genres in fresh ways, and that’s exactly what Yellow Brick Games did with Eternals Strands. It’s a third-person action adventure game stew with crafting, survival, Mass Effect-like companion quests, visual novel dialogue scenes, and massive boss fights as ingredients. It’s a tasty endeavor, but a repetitive quest structure and forgettable story causes Eternal Strands to be stretched too thin. It loses its luster and appeal in the back half of an overlong 25+ hour playthrough.
The gameplay is the most fun and appealing aspect of Eternals Strands. It can be chaotic at times, with magic setting the environment on fire or you desperately hanging on to a giant boss enemy, but that chaos is part of its charm. It combines third-person action, Shadow of the Colossus-like boss enemies, survival, and crafting into a unique gameplay experience. Through three expeditions each day, you’ll set off to the various hub worlds to explore, defeat enemies, and gather materials. Your player character Brynn will be equipped with a bow, sword and shield, and a two-handed greatsword for fending off opponents. But her magic is where the gameplay really shines.
You’ll blend together fire, ice, and kinetic powers to thwart enemies. It took me a few hours to get the hang of things, but once I learned how to mix Brynn’s powers together, the gameplay really opened up. For example, a kinetic power can trap enemies in a bubble of kinetic energy primed to explode. Feed some fire into it via Brynn’s drake’s breath power and suddenly you’re seconds away from an explosion coating your surroundings in a raging fire. Conversely, you can put enemies on pause by icing them in place and wailing on them with your melee weapons or launching ice mines at your trapped enemy, sending out sharped shards of ice in all directions. The moment-to-moment action in Eternal Strands is great – I just wish the game was so bloated that by the end I didn’t want to engage in that action.
Aside from normal-sized enemies, each level will have a giant Ark – magical constructs – or wild monster, like a drake, roaming it. Brynn will climb these beasts, dodging a grasping hand or clinging on for dear life as a drake flaps its wings to throw Brynn off, to chip away at their health in certain ways. The codex will detail how to damage opponents so that they expose their locuses, a glowing magical hotspot where Brynn will harvest the beasts for their strands of magic. These strands are used to enhance Brynn’s magical abilities, and you’ll have to take down each boss multiple times to fully upgrade Brynn’s magic. These are some of the most exciting moments in the game and a chaotic 10-minute battle against a giant robot wielding a flaming hammer made me want to keep coming back for more.
Brynn is what’s called a weaver, a user of magic. She acts as the point (something of a scout/hunter-gatherer) for a band of nomadic weavers. They’re travelling to investigate the Enclave, a gathering place of magic and magic users that has been cut off from the world for some time. Through a combination of luck and plot mysteries, they end up inside the Enclave where Brynn and company will work to piece together what exactly happened here.
There are definitely interesting elements to the game’s lore and story – the running weave and magic strands motif is fun – but for the most part the story is rather unengaging. Eternal Strands isn’t helped by such a mundane quest structure. For the majority of the game, each main quest you receive will send Brynn out into one of the several hub worlds in search of bits of information. Each time you’ll use the teleporting loom to go to a hub world, run around in futile search for an orange flame-like collectible, collect it, and listen as Brynn’s companions comment on whatever they learned from today’s orange marker. (If you pick it while enemies are around, you’ll have to listen to important plot information while also not getting offed.) Sometimes the quest collectibles are such a pain to find that I would run around the map waiting for the green and gold oval quest marker to pop up and show me where I needed to be. You’re often given no specific direction over where to search an area, making for a very repetitive quest structure.
My annoyance with the quest design in Eternals Strands got to the point where in the later acts I would simply run past enemies (or chuck them off the map if given the option) in search of that flame-like marker. You’ll constantly be sent to areas you’ve already scoured in earlier quests, causing a feeling of deja vu as you run around Upper Dynevron for the sixth time.
Eternal Strands isn’t open world; instead you explore a series of decently sized hub worlds. For new players, I’d recommend you don’t go off-script when entering a new hub world and instead mainline each quest. During my 25-ish hour playthrough, I searched every corner of a hub world when first landing, not realizing that I’d be back here time and time again to fight the same enemies in the same place. It got tedious after a while.
The companion quests would often have the same “go there and collect four items” quest objectives, but I found the personal storylines of Brynn’s fellow weavers more engaging than the main story of Eternal Strands. That’s not too surprising as developer Yellow Brick Games features former Bioware devs, and if there’s one thing Bioware is known for, it’s engaging characters. Unfortunately, you only ever engage with them through visual novel-like dialogue scenes; as someone who doesn’t ever play visual novels, I found this to hamper my engagement with the game’s many conversations, but your mileage may vary.
Frustratingly, the game didn’t need to be this bloated. At an appealing $39.99, Eternal Strands easily could have cut down on quests and story beats – many of which were easily forgotten – and still justified its price point. After over two dozen hours with Eternal Strands, I was ready for my playthrough to end. Even though I enjoyed exploring the hub worlds and tinkering with combat approaches, doing the same tasks, running around the same areas, and fighting the same enemies in the same places grew tiresome. It’s a shame, because for the first fifteen hours, Eternals Strands was poised to be one of the year’s better games. For the next fifteen, I was eager for the credits roll.
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