The Indie Informer

An Ashpeak Drake is attacking, and Brynn needs to get to higher ground. An incoming fireball shakes the tower, shattering crates and a bookshelf leaning against its stone walls. The wooden staircase is missing a flight, so Brynn uses magic to construct a crude bridge of ice to close the gap. Finally, she reaches the building’s summit and is greeted by the night sky and the glare of a snarling, draconic beast. As it rears back to unleash another blast of fire, Brynn uses the last of her magic to crust the creature’s wings with ice. As it spirals to the earth below, she leaps onto its back, slashing at it the whole way down.

This isn’t the description of a cutscene, quick-time event, or scripted boss fight – it’s an organic encounter I had with an enemy just a few hours into Eternal Strands. Its thoughtfully crafted physics systems and magic abilities make for a dynamic world that’s fun and complex, even in the earliest hours.

Eternal Strands is the debut title from Yellow Brick Games, an independent developer founded by a team of AAA veterans, including people who worked on beloved series like Dragon Age and Assassin’s Creed. Their first project is a third-person action title that stars Brynn, a magic-wielding adventurer exploring the ruins of an enchanting world.

The titular Strands are the source of Brynn’s magic. Each one allows her to interact with the world in fantastical ways, and you’re encouraged to use them liberally. You start with two: Weaver’s Grasp and Ice Wall. The former is essentially The Force – you can pick up most enemies and objects and toss them around dealing significant damage and clearing paths. Meanwhile, Ice Wall generates clusters of ice wherever you point, allowing you to draw shapes to put out fires or freeze enemies in place. 

These tools are incredibly intuitive in ways video games don’t always account for. Ice Wall, for instance, can obviously create walls of ice, but it can also freeze body parts of huge enemies, either keeping them stuck in place or temporarily disabling certain limbs. Freezing the wings of a Drake causes it to struggle to fly and crash to the ground. Freezing the foot of a giant ark, a magical colossus, keeps it stationary for long enough to climb on its back.

Climbing is not limited to combat – Eternal Strands allows players to climb on virtually any vertical surface. Brynn is limited by her stamina meter, but it’s very generous at the game’s opening, and I rarely lacked the stamina to get where I wanted to go. The world is broken up into a series of open areas the player can travel between, so while the story is linear, the player is encouraged to explore. Between the climbing system and magical traversal techniques, that exploration feels great.

Brynn defends herself with an array of weapons in combat, including a sword and shield, a bow, and a large two-handed blade that she can switch between on the fly. Combat feels good, complete with parries, dodge rolls, and a stamina meter, but you’ll almost always need to complement sword swings with spells. Many enemies automatically dodge arrows, so you need an Ice Wall to keep them in one spot. It’s also often more useful to throw one enemy into another with Weaver’s Grasp since it knocks both to the ground and gives Brynn room to breathe. I love this design choice; it makes combat cinematic and exciting while clearly distinguishing it from other fantasy-themed action titles.

Brynn’s equipment, including armor, can be forged and improved through the game’s crafting systems, which I returned to frequently. Between monster drops and destructible items in the environment, you can collect a wide variety of materials, and they’re sorted into a handful of wide categories. For example, “carved resources” include wood and some types of stone, while “forged resources” encompasses ores and metals. Instead of calling for specific materials, a crafting recipe only requires items from the category; instead of asking for five pieces of iron, it just needs five pieces of any forged resource. The specific resources affect the appearance and the stats, so a bow made with softwood is weaker and lighter in color than a bow made with ironwood. 

This ultimately means you can craft virtually any item as soon as you get the recipe. But you’re also heavily rewarded for exploring the world to get specific resources to customize the gear to your preferred colors and stats. I spent a good amount of my playtime hunting around for green materials (my favorite color), but a more strategic player may hunt for items that would make their armor resistant to cold or fire damage.

Eternal Stands’ combat encounters and resource collection occur on expeditions Brynn can embark on three times a day. Between these trips, she spends time back at the home base with the rest of her adventuring crew. While I find the supporting characters at least a little endearing, the story itself is not particularly interesting. Between a general lack of conflict between characters, the absence of a specific antagonist, and dialogue laden with exposition and proper nouns, I relied on the gameplay loop to keep me invested, not the story. This might change later in the game, but not in the first four hours.

That said, I am engaged with the storytelling in Eternal Stands, but it’s the story of my adventures exploring the world. When you give a player an exciting toolbox and drop them in environments designed to react to those tools in multitudes of ways, it creates countless unique, organic stories, like the perilous Ashpeak Drake encounter I recounted at the top of this piece. I can’t wait to hear other players’ stories when they get their hands on this game, and I can’t wait to dive back in to make more of my own.