Eternal Strands Ark of the Stricken Earth
Screenshot by Siliconera

Review: Eternal Strands Weaves a Tapestry of Influences

Being an iterative medium, it’s not surprising how common it’s become to describe games in terms of other games. Think of the rampant overuse and subsequent meme-status of phrases like “Skyrim with Guns” or “The Dark Souls of X”. But sometimes a game wears its influences so openly, or pulls so liberally from a variety of sources that it’s hard not to drop those names when trying to describe it. So it is with Yellow Brick Games’ Eternal Strands, which combines and recontextualizes mechanics from games as broad as Monster Hunter and Breath of the Wild. And while the resulting mélange of ingredients may not blend together seamlessly, neither do they clash and the resulting game is honestly a pretty joyful experiment in picking and mixing mechanics, backed up by a decent story and good voice work.

Recommended Videos

Developed by Yellow Brick Games with Bioware alumnus Mike Laidlaw acting as CCO, Eternal Strands is an action RPG with a focus on physics and exploration. You play as Brynn of Kalnhaven, a member of a caravan of itinerant mages called Weavers. While investigating the collapsed mage-run city-state called the Enclave your Weaver band becomes trapped and your leader injured, forcing Brynn to take on the role of Point. It’s from there that you’ll explore the ruins of the Enclave, search for supplies or materials, and try to find out what caused it to collapse.

Eternal Strands dynevron
Screenshot by Siliconera

In combat, Brynn controls as you would expect for this kind of action-RPG, with the usual suite of blocks, dodges and slashes. You can switch freely between a sword and shield, a bow, and a greatsword once you’ve crafted one, with certain magical weapons crafted later also having an elemental ability. My distinct favorite was the Kinetic Greatsword that let you use a soaring uppercut-slash, which doubled as a mobility tool for climbing. Generally the combat felt fairly basic, but then that’s because the intention is that you’ll also be using your spells and the environment as you fight too.

There are 9 spells you can learn and upgrade, and while most of them are fairly unique I did find the simpler ones you get early on to be the most useful. There are a lot of different uses for the Ice Wall power, that lets you create huge frozen chunks to serve as platforms, slow or pin enemies, or just cool the area down. But then the second spell that summons an ice mine mostly just deals damage, though it can be useful for tempering. The 3rd ice spell is admittedly very cool, as Brynn encases herself in ice for thermal protection and a new set of attacks, but again there was just little motivation to use it. There are few enemies that can’t be defeated by pinning them with ice and whacking them with a greatsword a few times.

Eternal Strands Weaverband
Screenshot by Siliconera

But while Brynn is the one seeing all the action, you’ll be relying on your fellow Weavers to get stronger. This is because rather than amassing experience points, your character’s strength in Eternal Strands is based almost entirely on the materials their gear is made of and what level of spells you have. That and how you use them, of course. Materials can be gathered in the way you might expect: drops from enemies, treasure chests, and broken pieces of the environment. The interesting part is that how you gather them can change the materials you gain, as heating or freezing metallic rocks can affect the item you receive when you crack them open. Similarly, fire can be effective against several icy, wolf-like enemies but can also burn their fur off, so if you want that specific material you’ll need to change up your strategy.

Then there’s the crafting system itself, which lets you craft armor and weapons from up to 4 materials each with their own stats. Metals offer heavy physical protection as you might imagine, while furs tend to be lighter and more insulative and each individual resource further leans towards physical, thermal, or balanced protection. There’s a lot of interesting little detail there and room for crafting specific armor sets for specific tasks, though I do wish the game gave you an idea of the break points for elemental resistances such as when you’ll be insulated against general ambient temperatures or your own spells. Lack of information is kind of a recurring bugbear in Eternal Strands, actually, as the game also doesn’t tell you what actually improves when you level up a spell either.

Eternal Strands crafting
Screenshot by Siliconera

But in general, the way you’re reliant on your team and the materials available to get stronger has a lot of cool thematic implications beyond the usual “I’ve killed a lot of dudes so I’ve gotten really good at it” idea that a simple experience system gives you. That said, while I ended up liking pretty much all the characters in Brynn’s weaverband (including ones I really thought I’d dislike!) they still feel like vendors rather than characters with at least similar agency to the player. Maybe it’s a bit of a big ask to fix, but because they’re almost always stuck at base camp they felt a little static. Perhaps being able to bring one with you or meet them in the field would have helped? Either way I’d take it as a sign the writing succeeded that I actually wanted to spend more time with these characters.

Back on the gameplay side of things, the actual core loop of the Eternal Strands felt very reminiscent of Monster Hunter to me. You get access to a new area and then explore it for new materials, armor recipes, and lore notes before returning to camp to upgrade your gear. Then, when you’re confident enough, you head back out to face down some of the Epic Foes that appear in each zone. These are the big beasties you’ll need to climb over and hit the weak points of the bring down, á la Shadow of the Colossus, Dragon’s Dogma or whichever you prefer. Not only are they a great source of high quality materials, but breaking certain parts allows you to reveal a weakspot that you can ‘harvest’ to unlock new spells and level up existing ones. All that stuff about using physics and elemental interactions on the environment works here too, so you can heat armor to make it break easier and drop different resources or load up a limb with ice to hamper its movement.

Eternal Strands eternal flame
Screenshot by Siliconera

These are, naturally, the highlight of the game and let you flex a lot of the tools you’ve gained. That said, there are some frustrations. The climbing can be just as finicky as in Dragon’s Dogma, especially as the monster itself moves around. You might be trying to climb up its arm to the head, only to find yourself accidentally crawling onto its waist with your camera spinning out because of the way the beast moved. I also found pinning monsters in place with ice gave you only a small window of opportunity to take advantage of it before the monster broke out, so I usually resorted to just coating a limb in ice to slow rather than stop it. This also showed off an interesting piece of animation tech, where the creature’s movements were slowed or moved in response to how you restricted it. It’s usually subtle, but if you massively overloaded one side of an Ark with ice, for example, you could see their gait lean sideways very amusingly.

Between felling beasts and crafting armor you’ll also be hunting around for lore tidbits and completing quests for your companions. These can be as simple as gathering certain materials or clearing out enemies, but a lot of the more interesting ones involve finding written records from before the Enclave’s collapse. Even if you’re not taking the time to read all of them, your companions will summarize and what is there paints a surprisingly in-depth image of the Enclave as a society. There’s a particular focus on, of all things, logistics and politics, which for a certain kind of freak (like myself) is genuinely compelling. You also get a good sense of the Enclave’s flaws and the political machinations that helped exacerbate it’s downfall, to the point I think it would be fair to call the city-state itself a major character in the game

Eternal Strands weaverband
Screenshotby Siliconera

The main plot itself didn’t quite hold my attention as much, though it wasn’t egregiously bad or anything. I’ve often criticized games from developers like Bioware and others for having what might be a good story but a bit of a lacking plot, and that’s something Eternal Strands also falls afoul of. Exploring and unraveling the mystery is fun, but the actual reveals don’t quite land. There’s also a moment perhaps a little over mid-way through the game that sticks out to me, when a new threat emerges and new characters are introduced. While they acknowledge the new threat and your party’s culpability for it, there was a distinct lack of urgency in the conversation that killed a lot of the tension for me. The side quests and conversations mostly made up for it, however, with a number of interesting threads about the Weaver’s lost heritage and history and how the Enclave changed their place in the world both when it was built and when it was destroyed.

I honestly went in to Eternal Strands with few expectations. I’ve loved a good many of the game’s stated influences but it’s easy to assume a lack of originality when what’s being borrowed is so recognizable. Thankfully, the game itself proved more interested in actually playing with the mechanics than just borrowing the appeal from other titles. It’s not a perfect mix, but Yellow Brick Games has me excited to see how they might build on what they’ve done here.

Eternal Strands is set to release on January 28, 2025, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. A Demo is also available via Steam and EGS.

8
Eternal Strands

Fight epic, towering creatures while blending magical abilities with an arsenal of powerful weapons to keep the world from crumbling in this third-person, action-adventure game.

A fun and inventive action-RPG that combines a variety of mechanics with some fun characters, spells, and surprisingly in-depth worldbuilding.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT
  • The ore-rich boulders found in Dynevron areas can be heated for a rich source of Epic-level metals
  • There is romance, but it's small and not a major feature. I ended up going for Casmyn, but Laen was also adorable.
  • Those wolf enemies were by far the most annoying, I often ended up throwing them off cliffs to save time.
Reviewed on PC

Siliconera is supported by our audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Learn more about our Affiliate Policy
Author
Image of Elliot Gostick
Elliot Gostick
Elliot is a staff writer from the mist-shrouded isle of Albion, and has been covering gaming news and reviews for about a year. When not playing RPGs and Strategy games, she is often found trying (and failing) to resist the urge to buy more little plastic spacemen.