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Eternal Strands (Xbox Series) Review

Unravelling strands

Eternal Strands’ developer, Yellow Brick Games, is made up of BioWare and Ubisoft veterans and it shows. You’ve got dense lore, likeable characters, great writing, and some light role-playing moments – but also that constant sensation everyone is an archetype rather than an individual. You’ve got beautiful regions that are a joy to traverse, entertaining elemental and physics interactions, and epic battles against giant foes – but also boring quest design and crafting mechanics that barely hide the fact they’re built on repetition. In contrast to so many recent releases, it feels smartly made and polished right out the gate, then proceeds to drag out the experience to the point I started disliking it the longer I played.

Give me more nice stories about nice people doing nice things

The setting, the cast, and their interactions with one another are perhaps Eternal Strands’ strongest element, even if it’s fantasy world and inhabitants draw on visual designs and cliches we’ve seen many times before. Protagonist Brynn – human-looking and not customisable beyond her gear and personality during some conservations – has joined of a roaming band of Weavers; think magic users that fell out of favour after “The Surge” originated from their homeland decades earlier. A cataclysmic event that led to numerous deaths across the Mayda Basin, followed by political upheaval, climate change, social unrest, and war.

She and her companions – a smith and her apprentice, an enchanter, an archivist, and caravan master – all follow veteran Weaver, Oria, and are looking to pierce a magical veil that surrounds their former homeland, The Enclave. After the tutorial ends with the band dashing to safety through the Veil, assisted by an Enclave automaton known as an “ark”, they find themselves stranded on the other side, with a vast wilderness and ruined cities full of hostile arks and magical beasts that have proliferated after The Surge. As the band’s new “point”, it’s up to Brynn to explore each new region for supplies, survivors, and clues to the fate of The Enclave during its decades of isolation.

Unsurprisingly, a diverse cast means different priorities they want her to tackle first, but Eternal Strands ultimately tells the same story regardless of your actions. There is alternate dialogue and some optional conversations that account for the order you tackle quests, but they converge towards the end of each act. Similarly, while you can shape Brynn’s personality during conversations – think brash, pragmatic, or cautious responses – it seems to have little impact on how subsequent quests play out, including a few moments of collective stupidity contrived to push the plot forward.

Perhaps more compelling are a string of optional companion quests that reveal more about their personalities, past trauma, current dynamics, a bit of world-building, and even Brynn’s past during lengthy discussions that let you dig deeper if you want. Everyone ultimately feels like an archetype designed to explore specific themes, but it’s hard not to admire their unflinching support for one another during a crisis. Coming off 50 hours with STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl and another 50 replaying the original STALKER Trilogy console ports, it felt pleasantly uplifting and heartwarming – even if you could argue the interactions feel too unnatural at times.

Unfortunately, narrative pacing and the momentum of the overarching plot is tied to quest progression… which brings us to the gameplay loop.

Fluid, fun, flexible, formulaic, and increasingly frustrating

As a third-person action-adventure hybrid, Eternal Strands starts strong but falters over time. How quickly will likely depend on your tolerance for repetitive and increasingly mundane busywork-driven progression.

With everyone relegated to hub areas outside of a few cutscenes, Brynn is responsible for solving every problem in The Enclave (and creating a few in the process). She can run, jump, and climb on almost every surface; block and counter with a sword and shield, cleave through multiple targets with a massive two-handed sword, and pepper distant enemies with arrows from a bow – all mechanics governed by a stamina meter. If you fall – in combat or off a cliff – a magical “Scry” device pulls you back to the closest “Loom Gate”, albeit at the cost of some materials in your inventory. If you’ve played a fantasy third-person, action-adventure game in the last decade, you’ll know what to expect.

As a Weaver, Brynn has a recharging mana pool to wield several kinetic, fire, and ice-based spells, and she can charge up enchanted weapon attacks; abilities that often serve a dual purpose. An ice wall slows enemies but can also create bridges over chasms. A cone of fire can set a group of foes alight or clear a path through rubble and ice. A kinetic blast can suspend enemies in the air or serve as a rocket-jump to launch Brynn. The very first power you wield, Weaver’s Grasp, is perhaps the most versatile, allowing you to rip up items for materials, fling objects at enemies, or simply toss smaller enemies off cliffs when you grow tired of battling mobs. Something all but guaranteed once you encounter new enemies around the mid-point that excel at interrupting Brynn’s movement and attacks.

That said, Eternal Strands has strong foundations and the opening dozen hours were a joy to play.

Heading out to explore sprawling new regions for the first time was a treat given Brynn’s fluid traversal mechanics. There are massive structures to climb with beautiful vistas to admire, lore documents to compile, crafting designs to uncover, and chests full of rare materials tucked away in the corners. It feels notably artificial in how evenly they’re distributed throughout each region, but still suitably rewarding for your exploration efforts.

A shifting time of day and malfunctioning magical weather devices mean each region can be explored under different conditions that affect elemental interactions and potentially weaken or bolster your foes. Scorching droughts limit the use of ice magic but propagate lethal fires that can quickly overwhelm mobs. Flash freezes limit the usefulness of fire magic but weaken the armour of larger enemies, making it easier to shatter. A surge of leaking magical mist, known as “tangles”, can block off some paths, but they provide deadly environmental hazards to exploit.

These variable conditions tie into the meat of Eternal Strands – taking down massive beasts and arks. You can slowly whittle them down with magic or arrows from afar, but the most efficient option is to clamber up and over them to remove armour plating, slash at weak points, and expose a locus point to harvest their “magical strand”, killing them outright in the process. A few odd-looking animations and janky physics aside, these battles are initially a lot of fun and visually spectacular as the environment is bathed in flames or ice, with small structures, foliage, and boulders shattered in their wake. They’re also the only way to get rare materials for quest items, improving Brynn’s gear, or upgrading her Weaver mantle.

There are only a handful of material types to consider – think metal, wood, mineral, fibre, and creature components – while the rarity of the materials affects the quality of the crafted item. You can also reforge an item by swapping in rarer materials or upgrade it by investing more of the same materials. There are distinct elemental weapons and armour set buffs, but using different materials of the same type can alter attributes like damage, defence, elemental resistance, and weight. Better still, any time you reforge or dismantle an item, you recover all the previously invested materials, with excess low-tier materials you can salvage into parts to upgrade your camp that, in turn, increases Brynn’s inventory space, the number of health and resistance phials she can carry, and how far you can upgrade her gear and spells.

At this point, you might be thinking with fluid traversal, fun combat, and flexible crafting, what could go wrong?

I’ll start off by saying I always appreciate developers who smartly work around a limited budget, and Eternal Strands punches well above its weight when it comes to the writing, expressive 2D character art, excellent voice work, the degree of environmental interactivity, and visuals that – despite some low-resolution textures and asset reuse – create environments with an impressive sense of place begging to be explored. In stark contrast, the quest design feels unambitious, monotonous, and shackled to increasingly onerous crafting demands.

The opening missions that task you with simple exploration, activating “Loom Gates”, hunting for clues, and defeating an ark or magical beast for the first time felt appropriate. Unfortunately, those opening hours are indicative of the whole. Even unlocking new regions or dealing with shifting climate conditions can’t offset a growing sense of repetition and tedium as the quest design fails to evolve over the next 20+ hours.

Simple fetch quests merely grow in length, dragging you through multiple regions, and often to the same locations repeatedly. Simultaneously, the need to collect materials and craft quest items becomes more prominent in later acts, for both critical and companion quests. The quest log and bestiary provide clues on how to gather these materials but a degree of randomness, both drop rates and how battles can play out, can force you to grind multiple encounters to complete a single quest.

Well into the fourth act, I found myself juggling four concurrent story quests, a deluge of companion quests, and I had accumulated a daunting checklist of required materials that guaranteed hours of grinding ahead to eke out any story progression. By that point, it already felt like I had been playing for twice as long as the 17 hours on my save file indicated, and my interest in playing Eternal Strands to completion plummeted.

The video game industry needs to remember the principle of less is more

For what feels like the hundredth time over the last decade, I found myself wondering why – especially with the ongoing debate around the unsustainable financial and time investment needed to create modern games – developers are so quick to add more content or pad out existing content, all to the detriment of the overall experience? Do developers and publishers still believe a screaming minority fixated on the idea game length equates to value is worth catering for, especially when we know through surveys, stat-tracking, and achievement/trophy lists that most people barely have enough time to play the games they buy, let alone complete them?

It frustrates me as Eternal Strands has a likeable cast, great writing, high production values, and solid core gameplay mechanics – yet it slowly unravels the longer you play, relying on a repetitive quest structure and increasingly tedious crafting requirements that drag out the time between narrative beats and turn the basic gameplay loop into a chore. I still think there’s an excellent 10 or so hours on offer, and I guess those who enjoy grinding out monster hunts will be more tolerant than I, but the developer and video game industry as a whole need to remember the principle of “less is more”.

Eternal Strands was reviewed on Xbox Series S|X using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC and PS5.

Eternal Strands (Xbox Series) Review

Eternal Strands (Xbox Series) Review
7 10 0 1
7/10
Total Score

The Good

  • A charming cast, great writing, and an uplifting narrative
  • Fluid traversal, fun elemental interactions, and epic fights
  • A flexible crafting system that encourages experimentation
  • Impressive production values from a small team

The Bad

  • Increasingly repetitive and monotonous quest design kills the narrative pacing and turns the gameplay loop into a chore
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