About 8 hours into Yellow Brick Games’s debut I came to what I consider the quintessential experience. I’d taken the protagonist Brynn into a marshland overrun by permafrost. This was a deliberate tactic because my target was the patrolling epic creature of that biome – the Ashpeak Drake. The Drake was a fire breather and with its surrounding area being frozen, its main weapon was going to be suppressed. It tracked me down in the remains of an ancient village and a pitched battle started – I was using ice to block its mouth, then climbing up to whack away at its wings, and head. Finally, after 15 minutes of back and forth, I hit it in the head one last time. Its horns shattered and the Drake collapsed mid-air, with me clinging to its head. As I dusted myself off next to its corpse, I panned the camera around to see that the fight had demolished most of the trees and buildings in the area. It was suitable evidence of the desperate conflict that had just occurred.
Eternal Strands is a lot of parts of games meshed together into a third person action game. It has the ‘climb on everything’ approach of Breath of the Wild, big monster fights (with refined repeat fights for better upgrades) like Monster Hunter and the ‘a grenade just rolled down the hill and to my feet’ mix of systems of Far Cry 2. The good news is that it comes out the other side with its own personality thanks to some strong writing and voice acting, and an art style that gives it a fresh veneer.
The setup is that Brynn, a scout for a small party of explorers, is helping them search for an old magic settlement. The world is set following a cataclysmic event that has caused a “Miasma” to spread. The group is forced to seek refuge as the Miasma threatens to kill them, injuring their leader in the process. Brynn then takes on the responsibility of looking for resources and helping everyone. She does this by using her weaving abilities (associated with fire and ice) and her natural agility.
What struck me about the narrative is that there was a lot of backstory to the world itself, each loading screen has tidbits about factions and larger politics at play; on top of that it also fills in the player about the dynamics of each of the party members. Importantly, it never felt too much like an info-dump and instead well sketched portraits of Brynn’s surroundings.
And what surroundings! Eternal Strands use of pastels is really well done, from the opening forest biome, through to the upper and lower cities, the colour scheme felt like I was walking through a comic book. The visuals would have been impressive as a non-interactive skybox, but what seals the deal is that there is an awe-inspiring verticality to each of the areas. Upper Dynevron was the standout for me; it had these huge edifices that I was able to scale and then hop from roof-to-roof. The feeling of being able to climb and go anywhere is supported by canny level design. I found myself wondering if I could get somewhere only to discover I could and then be rewarded by a beautiful vista, a collectible, or piece of gear that could be crafted.
The combat feels as good as the traversing. Brynn starts off with a sword and shield that provides basic hacks, blocks and parries, but is also gifted a weave ability that means she can lift up items and hurl them. This includes enemies and it brings with it the gleeful delight of long forgotten gem Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. I loved that I could just casually pick up an annoying monster and just fling them anywhere my whim desired (and sometimes to their immediate death).
Apart from the telekinesis, Brynn will later unlock specific fire and ice powers – being able to set whole sections on fire and watch it spread, or donning an ice armour that explodes into shards when destroyed. These are unlocked by defeating the epic monsters (one of which I mentioned in the opening paragraph) in each biome. These fights were another opportunity for Eternal Strands to flex how free form it is. Although each monster definitely has an optimal way to be defeated, it is not enforced unless the player is trying to unlock the more powerful version of the weave it holds. Instead, I spent time freezing limbs to bodies, then flinging explosives at heads, or using explosives to catapult me onto backs (for optimal stabby opportunities).
That seems to be Eternal Strands main motto – play it how you like and have fun doing it.
It all, mostly, works. The real problem though is that with all these great mechanics and strong writing, it still can’t cover up how many of the missions are just ‘collect X and then go to Y’. These are fetch quests, and a lot of them are not optional. For a game that offers so much expression in its mechanics it is a shame how much of a chore they can be. This is compounded by one truly awful boss fight where the ethos of freewheeling is dropped and Eternal Strands expected me to do some very specific things to beat it and all other tactics were dissuaded. It felt a bit like going around to a rich friend’s house and been shown all their toys, then midway through the day getting my hands slapped, given one crummy, half-melted Cindy and told to ‘figure it out’.
It was one sour moment that stuck with me as I got through the rest of the campaign and made me resent the final rote ‘farm this material from enemies’ missions.
All that said, I think that Eternal Strands has the potential to be the start of something very special. Yellow Brick Games’s debut has established a very strong vision of what could come next, and I hope they get to use these foundations for an even better follow up. The lore definitely feels like it would support it.
Eternal Strands is available to play on the ROG Ally and I am going to recommend turning down a lot of those graphics settings to ‘Medium’ and capping the frame rate at 60FPS straight away. From there I would tweak the things that are important to you up until the game starts to run poorly. You will see it happen in the big open areas, the ROG Ally simply cannot run it at full spec. The thing is, because of the great art direction, turning down the graphical fidelity isn’t really going to impact your overall enjoyment. My one complaint is that the combat controls feel fiddly on the heavy device – the block/parry being mapped to RB while you are expected to use the face buttons doesn’t feel very smooth, and this put undue pressure on my wrist. With all that said, once I got the graphical settings right it was really impressive to have all this running on a handheld.
ROG ALLY Corner
Conclusion
Eternal Strand is an immense start for Yellow Brick. There are so many perfect parts in this tapestry of ideas from other games, and its approach of letting players explore and figure out ways to use their powers is amazing. There are a few glaring flaws here, but I think it is a case of the rest of it being so good that those weaknesses are put into stark contrast.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
