Eternal Strands Is The Most Infuriatingly Imperfect RPG Of The Year
The first game from a Dragon Age creative director’s new studio doesn’t quite stack up.
Giant monsters roam the landscape, begging you to climb and topple them. A distinct magic system makes you feel the power and danger of spellcasting. A dangerous open world demands you prepare for each journey and travel at the world’s pace. I’m describing Dragon’s Dogma 2, one of my favorite games of 2024, but all of that also describes the ambitions — if not the reality — of the most fascinating but still mediocre new RPG on Xbox Game Pass.
Eternal Strands is the first release from Yellow Brick Games, a studio headed by former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw. The game follows protagonist Brynn and her Weaverband as they become the first people to enter the Enclave via the Strand Road since the Surge cut it off behind the Veil. Don’t worry, the story is just as bewildering when it’s delivered in-game, but in short, you and your group of mages sneak through a crack in the wall around a fallen magical civilization and root around for all the arcane goodies left behind after the apocalypse. Eternal Strands is not a game you play for its story, full as it is of cliches and stock characters, but there sure is a lot of it there.
Eternal Strands presents a magical world that’s a bit too hard to get into.
What you’re here for is expeditions into the Enclave, where you’ll use your very cool magic powers to engage in some less-cool-than-they-should-be battles against all manner of supernatural beasts. The core of Eternal Strands is its magic system, which lets you spread ice and fire to radically alter the landscape while flinging things around at the same time. Sounds great! But the dreariness is in the details.
The interplay between fire and ice in Eternal Strands can be spectacular. Spread ice across a surface that a dragon set ablaze, and you can extinguish it. Spray fire at a frozen wall, and you can melt it to reach the climbable rock beneath. Some foes can even be encased in ice, trapping them until they claw their way out.
The trouble is in how it’s executed. Early cutscenes during Brynn’s first encounter with a dragon show her using ice to plug up its maw or fight back against its fiery breath like a clash of energy beams in Dragon Ball. Neither of these are actually possible. The best you can do is wall yourself off with ice, though the way fire spreads means it will usually reach you anyway. Trapping foes with ice is just as limited, as you can’t really freeze them in place so much as build a frosty barricade.
The biggest drawback to magic is just how clunky it is. Picking up a boulder and hurling it at an approaching enemy (an objectively cool thing to do) takes so long you’re almost guaranteed to be attacked while you do it, and targeting is fatally imprecise, so you might miss your shot anyway.
If only this felt as cool as it looks.
It doesn’t help that combat with swords and bows is just as clunky, so fights mostly devolve into spamming the attack and dodge buttons until Eternal Strands’ overly punitive stamina system makes you take a breather. That’s most visible in the fights against Shadow of the Colossus-sized foes you need to defeat to upgrade your magic. Clunky controls will leave you missing shots against their tiny weak points, climbing the wrong way up their armor, and generally fumbling when you absolutely need to be on point.
Eternal Strands wants you to carefully explore its rather large world, a message made clear by the lack of map waypoints or quest markers and limited fast travel. But it can’t stop getting in its own way. There are vast amounts of resources to gather on each expedition, but your restrictive inventory prevents you from collecting much. A free-climbing system lets you cling to practically any surface, but there’s rarely anything interesting to reward you for your acrobatics. The world itself is just a bit too dull to make it worth exploring, especially with a frustrating battle around every corner.
There’s too much yapping in Eternal Strands, but the way it’s presented is great.
Despite all that, I can’t help but kind of like Eternal Strands. The premise of its magic system is fantastic, and when it all works as intended, it feels incredible. It has a genuinely good crafting system that lets you mix and match different types of resources to customize the properties of everything you create. And you just can’t deny the fun of picking up a magical robot with your mind and flinging it into an abyss.
Even some of Eternal Strands’ visible limitations are charming, like its decision to use 2D animation for some cutscenes and to play out conversations using static character portraits instead of animating everyone. Details like that show Yellow Brick Games smartly working within its budget, which blockbuster studios could learn from. I can’t really call Eternal Strands a good game, but it’s still one I’m fond of. In a world of games playing it too safe with franchise tie-ins and cookie-cutter gameplay, seeing a game that’s actually too ambitious for its own good is a welcome change of pace.
