Eternal Strands Review — Meaningful Magic

Eternal Strands is my biggest surprise of the year so far, delivering an incredible fantasy adventure game with great art, fun mechanics, and an incredibly interesting magic system to play with.

Eternal Strands follows the story of Brynn, a mage in a world where magic is feared and its users are demonized. Alongside a small band of fellow mages, or “weavers,” Brynn embarks on a journey to find the ancestral home of her people, exploring and restoring the long-lost land with magic, steel, and a sense of adventure.

Eternal Strands is the debut title of indie studio Yellow Brick Games, a studio founded by industry veterans, including Mike Laidlaw, former creative director of the Dragon Age franchise. It makes sense that their first game would be a fantasy setting, and they did not disappoint.

The first thing you’ll notice about Eternal Strands is its captivating world. Yellow Brick Games has designed a setting rich in lore and complemented by stellar visual design. The environments are breathtaking and visually stunning without relying on next-gen graphics. You don’t need a high-end graphics card to appreciate this game. Much of the visual appeal comes from thoughtfully crafted fantasy environments, rather than flashy effects like ray tracing or excessive bloom.

Not only does the game look great in the 3D space, with some super interesting character, armor, and weapon designs, but it almost sneaks in these wonderful 2D, hand-drawn cutscenes that add to the game’s charm. Yellow Brick has put their best foot forward with Eternal Strands, and has shown that the company has a real value and respect for art, something I hope serves as a precedent for their future games.

Eternal Strands is not just a pretty game with nothing to do, however; The developers absolutely knocked it out of the park with this adventure game’s mechanics.

The basic combat follows a traditional RPG formula: You block, dodge, and strike with multiple weapon types, each with their own stats and attack patterns. Combat flows nicely, but for the most part, is nothing really inventive or unheard of—that is until you account for the game’s magic system.

Eternal Strands features a revolutionary magic system, one where the spells in your arsenal actually have meaning and impact on the world around you. Essentially, you are armed with a handful of spells, which, rather than just being damage procs, interact with an environment built around them. Fire spreads and burns, ice creates blocks that chill, freeze enemies in place, and can be used as platforms, and nearly every object in the environment can be lifted and flung with telekinesis.

Eternal Strands’ magic system changes everything, challenging you to change the way you think about your approach to combat and exploration. It’s hard to describe the sense of freedom I felt when I realized I could freeze a giant’s foot to the floor or a dragon’s mouth shut, or create wildfires to wipe out hordes of enemies without ever coming into contact with them.

Crafting in Eternal Strands is also cleverly designed, taking a mechanic that can feel like a chore in other titles and refining it into one of my favorite aspects of the game.

In most games, upgrading your gear or creating new pieces from scratch requires you to hunt around for specific resources required by the item’s recipe. In many games with crafting, this locks the creation of better equipment behind a chore you have to go out of your way to complete. Eternal Strands eases this burden by removing the need for specific materials from many of its recipes. Instead, crafting recipes will simply ask for a certain number of materials from different categories. This allows you to craft gear with whatever you have on hand and often limits the amount of time you have to spend exploring for the right materials to finish your new sword.

Not only that, but Eternal Strands uses the ability to craft with different materials to allow you to further customize your gear. Different materials not only change the color of the gear depending on which you choose but also directly affect the item’s stats. Choosing what to craft your next chest plate out of is not just a question of what you have in abundance but also a strategic choice you can tailor to your build.

I only wish that the game took this idea further, as there are only really a few stats to improve when upgrading gear: defense, attack, and elemental resistances. While a really cool idea for a crafting system, it stands to reason that you’re always going to want to focus on the best attack for your weapons and the best defense for your gear. This can make crafting with resources that don’t focus on those aspects kind of a waste if you have the others to spare.

If there were one real criticism to be had with Eternal Strands, I would say that the game is weaker on the sound design side of things. Weapon attacks often feel unimpactful due to a lack of satisfying audio feedback, and some fights can feel lacking in tension when music is either quiet and unexciting or not present at all.

The game’s story may fall flat for some, making use of some fantasy writing tropes, but I wasn’t put off by it, even when I wasn’t totally invested in all of the game’s small cast of characters.

While sound is certainly an important feature in a game, it says a lot that Eternal Strands is otherwise perfect in other regards. If Yellow Brick could find a Masayoshi Soken of their own, I have no doubts this studio would be unstoppable.

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Eternal Strands is available on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.