Eternal Strands review – a game of real pluck

The story Eternal Strands tells is pretty good. A bunch of magic-users known as Weavers are attempting to recover their cultural homeland, which has been sealed behind a mystical barrier for ages. I am always up for any decent pulpy story that involves getting a gang of misfits together and returning to a hallowed place after centuries have passed. You know, and then trying to find out what went wrong.

All excellent stuff, and I really like it a lot. But what I legitimately love is how much Eternal Strands’ designers seem to love the game’s story, too. This love shows not only in endless dialogue choices and vast amounts of codex entries that have been scattered across the land and must be reclaimed and stitched back together, but also in the little details and embellishments that a story only gets if the people writing it have thought way too much about things.

Testify! Some of the magicians have formed a book club where the price of entry is a knack for not spilling the red wine that gets drunk at every meeting. One of the vendors, meanwhile, has gone a bit Frasier and insists on referring to their humble shop as an “atelier.” Both of these snippets of information deepened the feelings I have for Eternal Strands quite significantly. And both of them came from loading screen tool tips.

I’m starting with the story because Eternal Strands is the debut action RPG from Yellow Brick Games, whose founders include Mike Laidlaw of BioWare and Dragon Age. Surely, the story is where you begin with a Laidlaw joint. Hmm. Not so sure, actually. Over the hours I’ve taken working my way through Eternal Strands, while the story has been rich and textured and filled with human weaknesses and charm, what’s stuck out the most is just how systemic this game is. It’s a narrative-based adventure, but more than that it’s a sandbox for magic and elemental clashes you didn’t see happening but should have. It’s a riot. It’s explosive and silly, often brilliant and frequently hilarious.

At the heart of all this are the powers the Weavers wield, which are generally split across ice, fire and kinetic abilities – that is, you’re freezing stuff, setting it on fire or lobbing it around. Each of these powers forms a strand that can be woven into your toolset and strengthened. You still have a sword and shield and additional weapon options such as a two-handed heavy weapon and a bow and arrow, and you still have combat that favours the Dark Souls’ lock-on and stamina system. But I spent the first 40 minutes hacking through the game and cursing the fact that every grunt enemy’s health bar was a little too generous. That’s until I stepped back and realised that I was approaching it all wrong.

Instead, I should have been using those powers, along with the elemental aspects of the world around me. Eternal Strands’ environments are lush and detailed, and we’ll get to them properly in a moment. For now, all you need to know is they’re filled with stuff you can use in combat. Tree and rocks you can uproot and fling with Weavers’ Grasp, a kind of magical Gravity Gun deal. Stuff you can set on fire. Stuff that might freeze in interesting ways. Exploding stuff. Hold me.

So while an early game encounter might have seen me trying to separate a group of foes and then hack away at them individually, a few hours later I was playing the game very differently. I would set the landscape on fire and try to keep ahead of the flames while forcing enemies into the midst of the inferno. I would freeze a foe in place and then lob rocks at them. I would make a foe heavy but slippy with ice and push them off something. I would place little kinetic bombs that would implode and set off any nearby barrels of magical napalm.

This stuff never gets old, and it keeps fights exciting throughout as they scale to both your imagination (or desperation) and your understanding of the systems. I don’t think I ever used fire and ice to make steam to blind enemies, for example, but the systems are there to support this as an option. I also used these powers while navigating the environment. Just as Eternal Strands lifts what it needs from Souls games, it takes the climb-anything-but-track-your-stamina approach from Breath of the Wild, too, and combined with fire and ice, the whole landscape can be a puzzle. Cool down the flaming tunnel with ice blocks before you pass through, or craft armour with flame resistance and just run? Blast through an ice cave that will slow you down and eat your health, or climb the wall above it and look for a route past? Vines blocking a wall? Chuck a bomb at them and try not to set yourself on fire.

Both combat and puzzley traversal all have one thing in common: it’s very easy to accidentally freeze yourself, blow yourself up, set yourself ablaze or fling yourself into the abyss. This, it turns out, is something Eternal Strands doesn’t try to avoid. It’s hilarious, and you sort of want that untamed disaster approach from a game about meddling with magic. Also, you might learn something through exploding yourself in a novel way. Who knows? At its heart, what it means is that Eternal Strands’ magic joins the likes of Magicka and Noita. It feels like magic should feel: dangerous, uncontrollable and scary.

Since this is an action RPG, magical powers can also be levelled up and new abilities can be unlocked. When it comes to armour and weaponry (which governs basic stats such as resistance to things, damage dealt, health and all that jazz), you’re collecting resources from downed foes and the environment and plugging them into different armour and item designs to see which boosts they give you. Enemies will give you different resources depending on whether you set them on fire or froze them before you did them in, too. It’s a neat system, and feels a bit like tweaking recipes when cooking.

But in terms of levelling up magic and gaining new abilities, Eternal Strands deploys a really big idea. Wandering its worlds are various giant beasts – dragons, ice birds, a sort of chilly ferret and some massive towering human figures. Take them down once and they grant you a new power, but then take them down again – and meet criteria specific to each one in the vein of Capcom’s Monster Hunter games, such as knocking off bits of armour first – and you can start to harvest them and level up your powers.

All of this involves clambering over them, Shadow of the Colossus-style, hanging on while they try to shake you loose and hacking away when you see an opening. Each creature is distinct and memorable in its own ways. I loved the flaming hat man with the bronze bird feet who had gems I had to explode at certain points on his joints. I loved that chilly ferret who I had to descale and then – I still feel bad about this – set their hair on fire.

The beasts are found roaming the levels, and I think the game’s world design might be my surprise favourite part of Eternal Strands. Levels are vast and studded with different areas to uncover. You have tumble-down cities, caves, mountain crags, castles and defences, forests and marshes. All fantasy staples, but the sheer scale of each map and the artistry with which it’s put together just completely won me over. I spent a day on a recent mission climbing the honeyed walls of a valley looking for hidden camps in the rocks while fighting off flaming wasps. I spent a morning in a shattered town square trying to work out how to get into a secret area I could see through a crack in the paving but couldn’t access.

All of these areas tell the story of the game and its world just as much as codex entries do. You can tell which society got a bit too full of itself, and who was paranoid, based on the stuff they built and the stuff they left behind. And in between travelling to new and old areas and sounding them out for their secrets, you have a hub which you can level up with the resources you found so you can get better skills, build better weapons and armour and all that jazz that makes an RPG feel like a proper RPG – especially one like this where you level through loot rather than on a character level.

I’ll admit: sprinkled throughout all this are a handful of things I found slightly annoying. I never found basic enemies that interesting in terms of their combat design, although they always looked great. I also rarely found a mission that moved too far beyond: head here and look for stuff and see what happens, eh? There’s also a bit of obvious padding towards the final act, and while the game gives you brilliant magic to use, I worry that it didn’t prod me enough to really get the most out of it all. Perhaps this is, in part, my own failing, in that I’m lacking in imagination and I retreat to reliable solutions, but a team of this talent must also have it in them to work out how to get me out of my safety zone a bit more.

But crucially I understand all of this. Eternal Strands looks gorgeous and the polish is everywhere, but I suspect the team was pretty small and it’s also the studio’s first game. Padding in a game like this is often a case of a budget being used intelligently, ditto a system that applies different weather states to areas randomly, so one day it’s too hot and another day it’s too cold or riddled with poisonous magical gas. It feels like a smart way of getting the most out of what you have without working your artists until they leave work every night with a migraine.

In other words, it’s hard not to fall for Eternal Strands, and this is why I worry slightly. If you asked me what this game is, I’d say it’s a mixture of Fable’s bucolic loveliness and loose approach to action RPGing, and something like Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy in terms of being a combustible and hilarious sandbox. But it has a name that I still find hard to remember even though I’ve played it for the past two weeks, and while its art is charming and often really beautiful, it lacks a distinctive hook that makes it immediately identifiable. Put another way, I had a lot of fun here and I don’t want people to pass this by because they don’t notice it. Please know, then: this is a game made of sheer pluck and ingenuity. I would love to see what a sequel looks like.

A copy of Eternal Strands was provided for review by developer Yellow Brick Games.