Yellow Brick Game’s Eternal Strands launched in January of 2025 and if I’m remembering correctly I started playing pretty much on Day 1. I finished it today, about 18 months later.
That time-span says a lot. My final save was around 41 hours; it was a game that got pushed to the back burner over and over again, but also a game I didn’t want to abandon.
Eternal Strands is a 3rd person action adventure set in a universe that feels very complete but that we only see a glimpse of in this game. My guess is that Yellow Brick planned this to be a world they set a few games in, though I’m not sure if ES was a commercial success or not. [Google says it was not.] It was on Game Pass on Day 1, which is how I played it, and apparently the income from Microsoft was needed to get the game finished, and it didn’t make enough to finance a sequel without support from a partner. Again, this is all based on a quick search so take it with a grain of salt.
Combat in the game is divided into melee & bow physical fighting, and a magic system consisting of fire, ice and kinetic skills. It takes a bit of time to get comfortable switching around in battle but once you do it works well.
Additionally enemies are broken down into normal (eg human-ish) sized enemies and giant beasts/automatons that you have to climb on to attack. I found fighting normal sized enemies was satisfying and fun throughout the game. The big guys you had to climb were more of a mixed bag. When that combat jelled it was pretty cool, but too often it felt just a little janky. Imagine you’re clinging to the arm of a giant who is flailing around trying to shake you off. It gets really hard to ‘read’ what is happening since “you” get occluded by the giant’s body or other appendages and the camera doesn’t (and probably can’t) whip around fast enough to keep you in view. If it could keep up, it’d probably make the player dizzy or motion sick. As a compromise you can see an outline of yourself through the body which helps but when various magic effects are shooting off it is really easy to lose track of what is happening.
In practice, for me anyway, this boiled down to the early game giants being fun battles, but later they got more and more frustrating rather than entertaining. In particular as they got better at plucking you off their bodies and squishing you like a bug, these fights got decidedly un-fun for me. The final boss was one of these fights that was SO annoying I finally knocked the difficulty down from Normal to Story Mode just to get past it. When the game was over there were still a bunch of side quests I could do but honestly by that time I’d had enough of Eternal Strands. That said, if there was a sequel I would probably play it.
The game world is set up as a series of pretty large levels and your protagonsit, Brynn, uses magical gates to teleport to these. Some are linked and you can zone between them but eventually these connections either ended or I stopped finding them. Every time you go out on an expedition time advances, though it was never clear why that mattered except a few questions had to be done at night (every day had 3 ‘combat sessions’, two during daylight and one at night).
One of my gripes was that once you were out of camp you couldn’t change gear. That makes sense in a way; no one can carry several sets of armor and weapons with them, after all. But as a game, it was a little annoying to be in your “Fire Resistance, Cold Damage” loadout and run into an ice enemy, or vice versa. So I’d like to see that changed.
Which reminds me I should talk about the crafting system: it’s really interesting. As you roam around the world you collect materials both from fallen enemies and from breaking things (there are a LOT of breakables in the world, with a solid physics system behind them). You take these materials, and a blueprint, to your blacksmith. Each blueprint has several slots of materials to add and different materials change the stats of the final piece of gear. Stats are defense/damage (for armor/weapons respectively) but also things like fire or ice resistant and weight. Once you have a piece of gear you can level it up by adding more of the same materials to it, or you can ‘reforge’ it by swapping out materials.
I really enjoyed the crafting system and hope it returns if we ever get a sequel.
In terms of story…. it was fine I guess. The idea is that you and your group have entered into a giant ‘bubble’ that has formed around the area. The bubble contains the baddies who came through a rift and laid waste to the city/area the game takes place in. You’re there to explore and eventually to help put a stop to the enemies. If this sounds kind of vague it is because the story didn’t make a huge impression on me and I DID take 18 months to hear it all so I’m sure I’ve forgotten a lot of it.
My biggest issue with the story is that the group you travel with is so nice and so diverse and so… tension free, that it all felt kind of meh. It felt like a cast of characters designed to be as inclusive as possible with no chance of offending anyone, so there was just not a lot in the way of hooks. I guess I’d call them bland.
Anyway, I would recommend Eternal Strand for the combat and the crafting, but I don’t know that it was worth finishing. If, like me, you get to where the ‘giant’ battles stop being fun (and towards the end of the game you may have to do a decent amount of farming of them) then I’d just stop playing at that point. There’s no amazing story reveal at the end to make the frustration (if you get frustrated) worth the payoff. Right now it is $30US on Steam but it goes on sale (the lowest it’s been is $12), and that’s when I’d pick it up. It’s got good reviews on Steam, but not a lot of them. Kind of a shame that it didn’t get more attention, really. I’d love to see Yellow Brick Games make a sequel.