Eternal Strands Review (PS5) – Left Stranding

Eternal Strands is a tapestry with a lot of different threads. There’s a vibrant ‘lite’ world full of diverse and colourful characters some of which are anthropomorphic. There’s an intent towards telling a decent found-family story. There’s epic battles and climbing of colossi. And there’s a combat system that while a little shallow on its hack-and-slash mechanics, rewards you for using magic in interesting and novel ways.

Between all those different parts I felt at different points like I was playing The Witcher, Fortnite, Breath of the Wild, Monster Hunter, and Fable. You can see from the disparity of those titles that the scope is broad and that means there’s plenty trying to catch your eye, but it can also mean what’s here can feel a bit on the shallow side.

You play as Brynn, a healthy young weaver who just joined up with a new weaverband. Weavers are this world’s mages, but Brynn also sports a sword and shield combo and a bow. I could say at this point, she’s an all-rounder, and can use the best of everything. Or I could say she has very little in the way of identity as a mage, because she’s also a warrior and an archer. Like she was made by committee to satisfy everyone and every play style.

In this world, weavers are persecuted because a few decades back some of them brought calamity and war all through the world. Still more brought down a great wall around a section of the continent and hid a magical bountiful land called The Enclave beyond it. We’ve seen a lot of persecuted magic users at this point, but push through the cynicism.

Brynn joins a band of other weavers so healthy-looking and colourful as to never look persecuted anyway. They’ve all got sob stories and they all have some skill they bring to the group, like blacksmithing or knowledge of ancient magic etc. They are also all written in this overly modern style; for instance everyone is super concerned with everyone else’s feelings and speaking their truth, I lost count of the number of times some pseudo-modern-psychology was discussed and characters opened up and gushed and used very modern phrasing. It’s a little jarring in a fantasy world.

After an encounter with a dragon and a headlong dash through colourful forest, the band accidentally finds a very easy way to get into the decades-long-sealed-off place that they were intending to get to anyway. The boss bird is hurt and it’s up to Brynn to take point and go out on little exploratory jaunts into this long-unspoiled world to variously find important things, fix ancient things, fight monstrous things, or gather dozens of salvageable things.

It’s a serviceable story, and it builds to something more interesting with time as you push into deeper parts of the Enclave like the city and unearth more of its mysteries and past. Getting past the psychology student feeling of the beginning with the other weavers, and getting to the meat of them was also good and I came to enjoy a few of the characters. However, it struggles to ramp up to anything very epic or earth-shattering.

The structure is based around forays into the Enclave, pushing further and further, opening up neat shiny fast-travel loomgates, and picking up skins and items to use to improve your own armour and weapons. You can do three of these trips each day. When back at camp you’ll gather quests, or be told lore and monsters to find and slowly each character will open up etc. The ingredients are all there, but beyond the admittedly satisfying gameplay loop it didn’t really develop into something with much depth.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some nice ideas. Like for instance the reforge system, where virtually any item you find and bring back to camp can be used to re-stat your current gear. You can reforge it for Ice-resistant stats, or heat-resistant, or for a bit more welly. I enjoyed not losing virtually any items and always being able to redo my gear over and over when I gathered new things in a new region. But it’s also shallow and ‘lite’ for anyone used to complex RPG systems – there are only a handful of stats to shift and it never felt like it reached its potential as a system.

There is this massive focus on item gathering, like gathering the monster skins and bones and such in Monster Hunter, but then you have a tiny finite backpack and you are constantly forced to go back to camp and cut your exploration short. That makes everything feel like runs in a roguelite, which I didn’t hate, but I certainly didn’t really enjoy either. And all these items, they don’t go much further than the crafting and reforging mechanics and then they become obsolete and can be funnelled into expanding the base instead, levelling up the different stations your bandmates man.

During Brynn’s jaunts into the wilds you’ll encounter beasts to fight, and where Eternal Strands could flourish as a tight sharp action title it instead hits with the flat of the blade. Combat feels unresponsive and inaccurate. You know how in Monster Hunter you can bash away at an Anjanath or a Rathalos for minutes on end without it really feeling like the swords are connecting, or that your combos ever stop the creature in its tracks, until it eventually collapses.

Eternal Strands feels a lot like that. Smaller enemies seem to sort of slide out of the way all the time, forever just out of range. None really flinch very much and only a well-timed parry will ever stop them just carrying on with what they’re doing. There is a lock on, but it’s not well implemented, only seeming to work when the camera is facing the enemy, not on the other two enemies biting your ass. You have to literally turn the camera yourself (using up valuable less defended seconds) and then press the lock on to focus on the next enemy.

One thing it manages a fair bit better than Monster Hunter, and verges towards Shadow of the Colossus territory, is in having these epic boss battles with large monsters like dragons or bipedal ‘Arcs’ – like ancient golems. You can climb them, and there’s a devoted button to do so, and they try to shake you off while you’re stabbing the crap out of them and it’s really fun.

The golems in particular are fantastic, stomping round the wilds like Horizon’s Tallnecks and then trying to smash you to pieces. The best tactic is to get climbing them – Brynn can climb anything like she’s Link in Breath of the Wild – avoid their grabbing hands, find the weak areas of skins and stab them. Even better is they wear ancient armour you can break and watch plummet to the ground and then find Colossus-type weakness points underneath. If you want a Shadow of the Colossus-lite, this might scratch the itch very few games do.

And while we’re talking positives let’s talk about the magic and physics mechanics in Eternal Strands. Whatever I say about generic looks, simple story, or middling combat, cannot take away from Eternal Strands sporting one of the most freeing, thrilling, and satisfying magic systems in any modern game since Breath of the Wild. Fire magic; you can throw fire magic at a wall of ice and it melts, you can blast fire at wooden structures to burn down homes and villages, you can burn down locked doors, the ground gets hot and burns you and enemies alike. Ice magic; you can freeze the ground and hurt enemies, you can throw ice at a shield and make it heavy and unusable while you hack the enemy’s backside, you can jam up a dragon’s wings and bring him crashing down. Kinetic magic; you can pick up an enemy giving you a hard time and just fire them clean off a cliff. You can pick one up and throw him into his friends.

The level of available experimentation and scale of possibilities is really up there with the latest Zeldas. Those who like to test the physical limits of programming and developer’s thinking on these games will have lots to play with. I’m sure I have hardly scratched the surface of the possibilities of each of these spells and the way that it works on the world.

And coupled with the free-climbing of virtually any surface, and the breakability of a vast amount of physical structures, Eternal Strands can often feel more open than the open-world genre ever gets. More freeing than your average game. There was a moment when I was just given three quests at once and almost no markers where they were. I read the map for myself, I worked out routes for myself, and I found multiple ways into each area. I reached a tower and couldn’t find a way in even after burning doors. So I just climbed it. Brynn has a lot of stamina and with rest breaks I was able to gain access via a balcony with another burnable door. It just felt so unscripted and like my own choices had been realised to the fullest. Eternal Strands has a bit of that DNA that made players of Elden Ring and its lack of quest markers and handholding feel free to explore.

Eternal Strands is one graphically vibrant game. It’s colourful and shimmery and swirly everywhere you look, but have you ever just found that much colour can feel almost like its own version of generic? Like the vibrancy of Mario or Sonic but in a fantasy setting, kind of means the fantasy setting ends up having little identity of its own. The worst I could say is it has that modern look, that Fortnite/Overwatch look to it, where identity has been scrubbed away in favour of that weirdly homogenous aesthetic.

Beyond all the vibrancy, there’s a fair bit of texture pop-in especially when you first load up – if you start running immediately, you’ll have grass and rockfaces visibly popping in all around you. Coupled with the unresponsive combat, it started to feel rough. I think what’s happened here is something you see in Indies a lot – an achievable look was agreed upon in development, so that focus could be put on all the other things the team wanted to achieve. Eternal Strands wouldn’t have its incredible magic system if the devs had spent all their time and budget on far more realistic graphics.

So in the end Eternal Strands is a hard game to rate. It’s some crazy combination of monster hunting, rogue-lite mechanics, survival crafting, and fantasy RPG, that often feels like it’s trying to do too much for a game this size. It’s so broad in its inspirations and systems that many aren’t explored in enough depth.

At the same time, it’s a game with an incredibly well realised physics-based magic system, akin to Nintendo at their best. It gives you the freedom to interact with its world in interesting ways and provides endless experimentation options in combat. It’s a game that made me feel free to explore and rewarded my out-of-the-box thinking because it had been designed to do so. It’s a game with large boss battles you can climb and break and tear down and manages to reach beyond Monster Hunter inspirations towards something like Shadow of the Colossus.

That’s high praise even if other parts of the overall package aren’t really compelling enough to rely upon. Dip into Eternal Strands with your expectations at the right level and you’ll find a fantasy title full of fun and freedom.

Eternal Strands is available January 28th for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows PC via Steam.

Developer: Yellow Brick Games
Publisher: Yellow Brick Games

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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