Eternal Strands – Epic battles against massive creatures

• DEVELOPER: Yellow Brick Games
• PUBLISHER: Yellow Brick Games
• PLATFORMS: PC, Xbox Series X/S
• GENRE: Action / Adventure / RPG
• RELEASE DATE: January 28, 2025
• STARTING PRICE: 39,99 €
• REVIEWED VERSION: PC

“Mom, do we have Shadow of the Colossus at home?” “Yes, we do. It’s called Eternal Strands.”

Jokes aside, playing Eternal Strands reminded me how fun games can be, even when they draw clear inspiration from other titles. Despite its influences, this game delivers a unique and enjoyable experience. It’s an ambitious action RPG that combines creative, physics-based gameplay with towering, epic battles against colossal foes. The game’s strengths lie in its improvisational combat, environmental interaction, and open-ended exploration. However, these highs are offset by a slow-paced narrative and repetitive smaller battles. While Eternal Strands shines during its most creative moments, it struggles with monotony and occasional frustration.

The story is somewhat sluggish, but it’s actually not too bad

The story centers on Brynn, a Weaver exiled by society following a magical catastrophe known as the Surge. Alongside her allies, Brynn explores the mysterious Enclave, uncovering its secrets and investigating the origins of the Surge. While the premise is intriguing, the narrative pacing is slow, with major developments only emerging midway through the game. The early stages often feel repetitive and lack the momentum needed to fully engage players.

Brynn is a likable protagonist, but the game struggles to provide compelling reasons to engage in its lengthy conversations with various characters. While the voice acting is impressive and the world is rich with lore, the delivery often feels lackluster. Side quests do help flesh out the history and relationships between characters, but they lack urgency and depth, further slowing the narrative pace.

Although the characters each have their own unique charm, I found it difficult to connect with them. Many of their conversations felt meaningless, and I often ended up skipping through dialogue that failed to hold my interest. I’m not sure why such a strong emphasis was placed on the story in Eternal Strands. It’s not terrible by any means, but it lacks the depth and intrigue needed to truly captivate players. That said, where the game truly excels is in its action-packed gameplay.

Thankfully, the combat is excelent

One of Eternal Strands’ standout features is how it encourages experimentation with a variety of tactical approaches to combat and exploration. Thankfully, the combat system is straightforward and easy to grasp. You can wield multiple weapons, such as a sword and shield or a bow and arrow, and the game includes an excellent parry system alongside the ability to dodge enemy attacks. However, the real highlight is its elemental powers, which add a unique layer of strategy and excitement to the gameplay.

For instance, the ice power is far more versatile than just freezing enemies. You can use it to create bridges, extinguish fires, or even pin down a titan’s limb during an intense boss fight. Telekinesis adds another layer of strategy, allowing you to manipulate objects to disable enemy shields or trigger environmental hazards. Fire powers let you melt ice and unlock new areas. The sheer variety of uses for these abilities adds a dynamic element to exploration and combat.

Since battles are heavily physics-based, there’s a sense of unpredictability that keeps things exciting. You can be thrown around by massive creatures, take fall damage, or even get flung into hazards like a ragdoll. This creates plenty of opportunities for creative problem-solving and keeps the gameplay engaging and fresh.

Battles against Great Foes are as much about solving puzzles as they are about combat, demanding careful planning and creative use of your powers to exploit their weaknesses. Whether you’re scaling a dragon’s wings or pinning a giant’s arm to the ground, these encounters feel epic, varied, and deeply satisfying. They also present meaningful choices: defeating a Great Foe in a specific way rewards you with power upgrades, while taking them down through more traditional methods grants rare crafting materials. This innovative system adds an extra layer of depth and makes the gameplay even more rewarding.

Smaller-scale combat falls short

The game introduces a dynamic weather system that impacts both exploration and combat, but rather than enhancing the experience, it often feels like an unnecessary obstacle. My biggest gripe is the miasma weather effect, which engulfs the world in a magical purple fog. Stepping into it is practically a death sentence, and the dense cloud severely limits visibility, making it hard to navigate or see what’s happening on the map. Similarly, flash freezes and droughts force you to manage temperature through potions or gear, but the game offers little feedback on how effective your preparations are. A system to show how well your gear counters specific weather effects would have been a welcome addition. Instead, these events frequently disrupt gameplay, making navigation and combat feel unnecessarily frustrating.

While the Great Foe battles are genuinely engaging, the smaller-scale combat falls short in comparison. It quickly becomes repetitive due to a lack of variety in enemy types and limited melee weapon options, which are restricted to just two archetypes. Additionally, the core combat mechanics remain mostly static throughout the game, offering little in terms of progression. The versatility of your powers does help to break the monotony, but it’s not enough to completely mask the repetition. It can become especially frustrating when dealing with groups of enemies, like three archers attacking from all directions. In such cases, the best option often feels like running away rather than engaging with them.

Exploration in Eternal Strands is open-ended, allowing you to climb nearly any surface and break down environmental objects for crafting materials. However, the incentive to explore feels minimal, as the most valuable rewards, such as gear blueprints and crafting materials, are tied to story progression rather than discovery. Additionally, the climbing mechanics leave much to be desired. Climbing consumes a lot of stamina, feels sluggish, and can be frustrating to use, particularly when you’re trying to escape from enemies.

Weather conditions are more irritating than fun

The game introduces a dynamic weather system that impacts both exploration and combat, but instead of enhancing the experience, it often feels like an unnecessary obstacle. My biggest complaint is the miasma weather effect, where the world is engulfed in a magical purple fog. Stepping into it is practically a death sentence, and the dense cloud makes it incredibly hard to see what’s happening on the map. Similarly, flash freezes and droughts force you to manage temperature through potions or gear, but the game provides little feedback on how effective your preparations are. A system to show how well your gear counters specific weather effects would have been a welcome addition. Instead, these events frequently disrupt gameplay, making navigation and combat feel unnecessarily frustrating.

Eternal Strands ties all progression to its gear system, which allows for upgrading and reforging using crafting materials. While this ensures that even starting equipment can remain useful, the system feels overly convoluted and tedious. Swapping armor for specific situations, like boosting stamina during a Great Foe battle, equires manually equipping each piece of gear, as there’s no option to save loadouts. This makes frequent gear changes a chore. The lack of meaningful upgrades to health or stamina outside of gear progression further limits the sense of growth. While managing equipment starts off as an enjoyable mechanic, it eventually becomes repetitive and time-consuming.

Another issue is the limited inventory space for carrying resources during exploration. To craft legendary or epic gear, you’ll need to grind materials constantly. While resources are relatively easy to gather, the combination of environmental hazards and relentless enemies makes the process more tedious than rewarding. Larger creatures will attack on sight, and for some reason, enemies seem to have an uncanny ability to detect you from great distances, often chasing you endlessly. This relentless pursuit, coupled with the environmental challenges, can make gameplay feel like more of a slog than a proper adventure.

Ending thoughts

Visually, Eternal Strands is vibrant and colorful, with striking character designs and seamless performance, even during intense battles. The anime-style cutscenes punctuate key story moments, adding flair and drama to the narrative. The soundtrack, composed by Austin Wintory, is absolutely stunning. Its sweeping orchestral tracks amplify the scale and tension of the Great Foe battles, making these already epic encounters feel even more grandiose. The sound design is polished overall, with effects and music that perfectly complement the gameplay’s intensity.

Eternal Strands is a game of contrasts. While it boasts many strong elements, certain flaws hold it back from reaching its full potential. For fans of action RPGs and Shadow of the Colossus-inspired games, Eternal Strands is worth exploring, but its inconsistencies may test your patience.

The inventive power elements and epic Great Foe battles are highlights, delivering some of the most creative combat in recent memory. However, the repetitive smaller encounters, slow pacing, and overly complicated systems occasionally detract from the experience. I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game and can confidently recommend it. Just give it some time to grow on you, you might find yourself enjoying it far more than you initially expected.

Review copy provided by the publisher

3.8