Eternal Strands

Eternal Strands is a third person action-adventure game developed by Yellow Brick Games who are led by Mike Laidlaw of BioWare fame. The game looked akin to Immortals Fenyx Rising: colorful, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild -inspired fun, with maybe a touch of Shadow of the Colossus. However, it didn't turn out to be nearly as competent. There were few amazing moments but overall Strands is a repetitive experience that more than overstays its welcome.

Action-adventure of unfulfilled promise

You play as Brynn who is the scout for a band of Weavers who are looking for the Enclave -- a nation of sorts that disappeared with some magical cataclysm. The game begins with some lethal mist or whatever partially overtaking the band's caravan. Thus, in addition to the original task, you'll also be gathering resources to recover from the loss. The journey takes Brynn to various regions as the game's fast travel network is reconnected.

Anthropomorphized animal races are a pet peeve of mine. Was it really necessary to have a human speech producing bird humanoid and whatever bear the other one is? Oria, the bird in question, the band's leader, is voiced by Pandora Colin who is Philippa Eilhart in the Witcher games. Her voice fits the leader role perfectly -- just why did it have to be a bird? Alex Jordan is the band's enchanter Dahm -- again cast as a moaning character.

So much lore

Video game writers must have a lot of time during development to do their thing. That seems to often result in pages and pages of lore and dialogue. And in this case, it wasn't very interesting. I started avoiding optional dialogue and skipping everything else: I didn't care.

It didn't help that dialogue happens in style of visual novels with 2D character avatars. In an isometric game that would be okay because you rarely, if ever, see the characters up-close and don't except them to have facial animations and such. But in a third person game it's immersion-breaking. It obviously saves time and effort for the developers but it made me despise all the talking.

There are few 3D cutscenes too. Their direction is amateurish, camera often lingering in a shot that no longer is showing anything. And in addition, there are animated 2D cinematics. They reminded me of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Strands is a mere 20GB download, probably due to its stylized, simple visual style -- and probably thanks to that, too, the game ran quite well for me despite being an Unreal Engine 5 title. The looks are close to the aforementioned Fenyx Rising but the color palette is closer to Torchlight -- which has near identical visual as well.

Content largely insubstantial

From breaking environment and killing various enemies, you'll get resources for crafting and improving gear. It's annoying how your inventory size increases are locked behind camp upgrades that are tied to story progression. You can hold any number of any single resource but the amount of slots you have is limited. And there are so many different types of materials in Strands. Once your inventory slots are full, you'll have to do triage or return to the camp. The feature is so unnecessary. Also, if you manage to die (or rather, get to a point Oria has to whisk you away from death), you will have to pick which few resources to keep from your inventory: the rest are lost.

Killing normal enemies becomes a chore quickly. They feel spongy even on normal. The Weaver's Grasp power is unlocked from the start and I would just grab enemies and slam them to the ground to smack them while they recover. And then repeat if necessary. In late game when I no longer needed crafting materials from them, I would just yeet everything off ledges whenever possible.

I favored light armor to have a lot of stamina for climbing and sprinting around. Sprinting starts after a delay, which is just weird and feels nonresponsive -- don't do this, devs. With some practice, you can use Ensnaring Blast to launch yourself over gaps. After defeating the final boss you also get Kinetic Stream that makes getting to places even quicker: good for collectible cleanup.

The game's bosses are more interesting enemies. As long as Brynn has stamina bar left, she can climb about any surface. That includes the bosses. Climbing them to break off protections and whatnot was cool. The first time you kill a type of a boss, you get a weave strand, new power to use. In consequent harvest kills you further increase the power's strength.

One memorable moment

Eternal Strands peaked when I was doing my second boss kill, harvesting an Ark of the Stricken Earth. How the main motif of the boss fight theme -- by Austin Wintory -- was played when I crashed down with the defeated colossus was absolutely epic. The game never got to that high again. Boss killing becomes routine and the later battle themes aren't quite as good, even though they too play the same motif upon victory.

Harvesting an Ark of the Forge is tedious  -- and you'll have to do it twice for 100%. To be fair, it could be possible to destroy all of its vents in one go (somehow) but if you can't do that, repeating the boss's rage cycle is damn tedious, especially if takes three of them like on my first harvest kill.

The final boss also needs to be harvested once after defeating it in the story. That can be tricky because you need to freeze one of its arms to have enough time to extract its core and that seemed to be very challenging. I got lucky, though, because after a while the boss glitched and I could harvest it without being grabbed in the middle of it.

Eternal Strands is relatively easy to 100% -- there's nothing missable -- but somehow the 33 hours it took felt a lot longer. It should be noted that my 100% covered only the at-release content and the game's achievements: Yellow Brick had added a whole new optional map to the game but I didn't bother fully clearing it.