I’m a simple man. You tell me you are making a new IP mixing gameplay styles from some of my favorite games, I’m gonna pay attention. The pitch for Yellow Brick Games‘ Eternal Strands sounds like a dream come true: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom physics-based gameplay mixed with Shadow of the Colossus’ “David vs Goliath” motif, spiced up with a Monster Hunter upgrade-hunting loop. Coupled with the fact the game was being developed by a team led by former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw, I could feel the weight of the right ingredients mixing in for something special.
While it sometimes buckles under the weight of potentially being a “Jack of All Trades, Master of None,” Eternal Strands ends up being a solid sum of all its different parts. It takes a while for all of its systems to come together, but the potential is there for something truly great in the future.
Veil Guard
Eternal Strands puts you in the shoes of Brynn, a magical weaver living in the fictional world of the Mayda Basis. Years prior, a calamity known as the Surge ravaged the world and shunned the continued use of magic. Living adrift without a sense of purpose, Brynn and her ragtag group of travelers (AKA the “weaverband”) find themselves travelling and finding the lost city of “The Veil,” a special place where old magic practitioners known as the Enclave used to live in prosperity before what happened during the Surge. Hoping they could still find more magic practitioners, Brynn and her weaverband venture deep into the Veil, hoping to piece together the whereabouts of the Enclave and see if they find a place for their kind.
There’s definitely more to the story than the aforementioned setup. The thing that definitely struck me about Eternal Strands is how, for a game that borrows heavily from the previously aforementioned games, I could also feel some of that old school Bioware style of storytelling and world building attempted for the setup and background of this game. While there is plenty of terminology that feels ironically generic in lieu of many recent fantasy games, there’s storytelling charm that harkens back to Mike Laidlaw’s previous work, and fans of lore and world building can definitely sink their teeth deep into this game’s own codex and how well thought out the Mayda Basis feels.
However, I do feel the storytelling in Eternal Strands suffers a little bit from an indecision to commit to a storytelling style. The storytelling varies wildly, from Princess Mononoke type anime cutscenes to in-game model cutscenes before settling on the majority of its storytelling being static images of each character having a conversation with each other in a way that reminds me of last year’s Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. It also does the awkward transition where you start a conversation, it cuts to black, and you see the camera zoom into the 3D models before cutting to black again to the static images. While I feel the character models are great and the art direction is solid overall, the inconsistency in styles perhaps exposes budgetary constraints that took me out of the storytelling more often than not.
As for the story itself, I feel the game definitely focuses more on the relationship between Brynn and the different members of the weaverband, with the rest becoming just world building. The world within The Veil is tantalizing with plenty of collectibles fleshing out the background of what happened to these different places. But it’s also an overly empty one where you only run into enemies during your explorations. Besides some developments halfway through the game that introduces a new hub with some new characters, most of the time the game is just about you and your companions, until some very late developments give a grander scope to things which then feel like they got punted to a potential sequel.
Weavering Waves
Eternal Strands is a third person action game set in separate semi-open world hubs that rely heavily on a physics-driven sandbox that facilitates its inspirations from both The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Shadow of the Colossus. Like in the Zelda games, Brynn can run and climb almost everything like a human gecko as long as her stamina meter doesn’t give up. Stamina definitely dictates plenty of Brynn’s physical abilities, from her climbing, sprinting, and melee combat. Thankfully, unlike the Zelda games, there is no weapon durability you need to worry about.
If you play Eternal Strands primarily as a melee combat gamer, you are going to have a tough time with the game. Melee combat, for the most part, is very limited and feels unintuitive and overly stiff. It feels inelegant, and when you are surrounded by more than two enemies in the early hours, you will find plenty of frustrations at its initial limitations. You also have access to a bow if you want to attempt distant attacks, but this, too, feels very superfluous early on. While further gear upgrades and special weapons you build give a few more options for the combat to feel better later on (especially unlocking the two-handed weapons, with a particular Kinetic one being a blast to use with how it sends you to the air), this is not a game I can recommend if you are going to play it just from melee alone. There is a reason why Brynn is a magic weaver, and the game reminds you often of that.
Magic use in Eternal Strands is where the magic (pun definitely intended) in the gameplay resides. When you go all in and use Brynn’s magic during combat encounters, initial stiff gameplay starts flowing much better, and the dance between using melee attacks to quickly build magic to then unleash your power on enemies never gets old. The game’s physics sandbox gets unleashed with your magic abilities, and you’ll feel like a Jedi Knight straight from The Force Unleashed when you start grabbing almost every object around you, hurl it to your enemies, or hurl enemies at each other as you build your power set, which includes freezing them or setting them ablaze. The success of the magic system definitely relies on you being creative with how you use it because I can see a scenario in which players will not combine the different magic pieces together and, thus, will fail to exploit the system and the physics around it to the fullest. And the only way to really build and unlock your entire magic kit is by engaging against the game’s massive bosses.
Shadow of the Ark
As someone that considers Shadow of the Colossus one of the greatest games of all time, I feel Eternal Strands nails that “David vs. Goliath” feeling with Brynn fighting against the giant Ark colossi and the different massive beasts. But what actually sets Eternal Strands apart from its inspiration is how it perfectly marries both a Shadow of the Colossus and Monster Hunter feel when engaging in these fights. You can absolutely bring down these beasts with the traditional use of your weapons and magic abilities to wither down an enemy’s health. Or you can climb all over the beast, striking specific weak spots which then could deliver their ultimate weak spot that takes them down in one shot.
Nailing those weak spots is where the Shadow of the Colossus “puzzle” element of the fight kicks in, and while the game’s codex can sometimes completely explain to you how to take down these beasts in this specific way (which, mind you, is the only way to fully upgrade your magic), if you are feeling daring, you can also figure it out yourself. Sometimes, the logic to unlock the weak spot can be overly clunky and finicky (particularly the fight against the Brennig Glasstail dragon). For the most part, however, all of the battles, save the final boss fight, felt properly thought out to give the game that Shadow of the Colossus magic I haven’t felt since 2005. Who would have thought being able to climb and slay a massive beast would still be so cool?
Since I’ve mentioned Monster Hunter quite a bit, a lot of the game’s gameplay loop does have an air of that series in how you can constantly load in and out of the game’s different zones to hunt these massive colossi creatures where you get plenty of materials that you can use for the game’s crafting system. While initially a very obtuse and limited system that felt like survival clunk that wasn’t needed, it eventually evolved into a pretty simple and quite addictive gameplay loop where the allure of crafting more powerful weapons and gear with special features (say “Max Stamina” or “Max Magic”) kept me very entertained as I kept attempting these big fights over and over again. While the method of fighting them remains the same, the variety was found in the randomized rotation of fighting each of them in the different environments, sometimes with different random weather effects. It strikes that balance between random and curated, and I’m glad Eternal Strands didn’t fall deep down the hole of being a rogue-lite experience despite the randomization of what happens every time you revisit its places.
A lot of this constant upgrading of your gear and magic does tie back to how focused this game is in your camp and your companions. A lot of the missions do center on the improvements of your camp, and it tends to make the mission design overly fetch quest-y when it’s not specifically about hunting one of the big beasts. While the payoff does give you more time and dialogue with your companions in order to grow a bigger comradery with them, the fact that most of them never go out on the field with you and remain on camp does limit your connection to them to those static image conversations and plenty of “intercom” chatter while out in the field. It’s certainly an attempt at doing a little Bioware-like companion building, but it’s more surface level besides the gameplay upgrades you get out of them.
Built on Unreal Engine 5 and using some of their latest Nanite and Lumen rendering techniques, I’m actually quite pleased at how mostly polished Eternal Strands is despite its heavy emphasis on physics manipulation that could have easily broken the game. While at first glance it feels like Yellow Brick Games looked at the Fortnite cartoony aesthetic and went, “Let’s make a magic game on that,” I feel the choice of aesthetic helped a lot in making the game work as solidly as it does. The character modeling in the game is beautiful, and the magic particle effects pop really hard to make for a shiny, pleasing aesthetic.
Playing on both the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro, I found the game performed quite solidly on both, other than a few times late in the game where the framerate started dipping really badly despite nothing taxing happening on screen. It holds its 60fps target for the most part, with the only difference between the base PlayStation 5 and the Pro being a slightly sharper dynamic resolution on the Pro. Besides the aforementioned framerate drops and a weird visual bug late in the game that made the textures on my base camp not load and look like everything was on fire, I don’t have much to complain about the game’s technical chops.
Magic Hunter Wilds
Considering we are at a time where new IP is so scarce and new games from the talent that brought me some of my favorite franchises from yesteryear feel like they don’t hit the same heights, I feel I can notch Eternal Strands as a solid win for Yellow Brick Games. While I feel Eternal Strands’ story could have been stronger based on its intriguing lore and the melee combat could have been less clunky, when the magic begins flying around and its gameplay inspirations coalesce, I see an absolutely solid foundation to keep building upon. Magic games that succeed are quite rare, and I feel wrapping it around some really solid gameplay inspirations to build from here can lead Yellow Brick Games on a path to greatness.
In the meantime, I’ll go back to maximize all gear and keep reliving these massive bosses over and over.
Thank you to the team at Yellow Brick Games for providing a review code for Eternal Strands. You can find Seasoned Gaming’s review policy here.
