Breath of the Wild wasn’t a perfect game, but its influence is undeniable. It wasn’t long before gamers saw other games with big open worlds where you could climb on anything and glide across sweeping verdant vistas. In most cases, the imitators only copied the surface-level features and failed to capture the spirit of innovation and wonderment.
Eternal Strands proudly wears its influences on its sleeves. It isn’t coy about its Breath of the Wild inspiration, but that isn’t the full story. Yellow Brick Games takes ideas from various fan-favorite action adventure games and mixes them into one big tasty gumbo that could only come from Quebec. This combines aspects of Shadow of the Colossus, and Monster Hunter too.
With such an eclectic mix of epic action adventure games, how does Eternal Strands stand out? Is it just a checklist of popular concepts thrown together or can it carve out its own identity? Find out in our Eternal Strands review!
Eternal Strands
Developer: Yellow Brick Games
Publisher: Yellow Brick Games
Platforms: Windows PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S (reviewed)
Release Date: January 28, 2025
Price: $49.99
Eternal Strands does not put its best foot forward. The melee combat is limp and Brynn always feels like she’s whiffing her attacks when they connect to the broad side of a wolf’s skull. Enemies have no audible cue when attacking, making parrying way harder than necessary. Worse yet, it takes a long time before the cool magic mantle powers become available.
The narrative and characters don’t do the game justice. There is way too much exposition that ultimately amounts to nothing. Characters will prattle on about things the player never sees. There are no flashbacks and most cutscenes are done in a very cheap visual novel style with dialogue choices that have no consequence.
The characters are worthless and make no sense. There are only two male characters, one of which is a huge burly bear monster with tusks who never fights. This guy looked like he would get the job done all by himself. Instead, Brynn, the very dainty and weak-looking chick who looks like she can’t do a pull-up endures unbelievable trials that would make the labors of Hercules look like child’s play.
After losing complete interest in the story early on, the plot about a band of vagabonds rolled off me like water on Teflon. After I stopped caring, Eternal Strands became really compelling and interesting. Regretfully, the story and characters are nowhere near as interesting as the developers thought and the less the player knows, the experience becomes more intriguing.
Yellow Brick Games should have opted for a “less is more” approach to the story. It didn’t need more than the intro animated sequence and the flavor text. The only other dialogue is between Brynn and the gang via telepathy while exploring the stages. They could have cut out all of the visual novel stuff entirely and it wouldn’t have been missed because the story was perfectly understood while skipping it all.
Eternal Strands‘ structure revolves around exploring mini-sandbox stages, gathering materials, finding story-related key items, and returning to home base to unload. This isn’t a big open world and Brynn won’t be gliding around, trivializing the environment. These places are broken up into sizable chunks with a few warp gates to make getting around prior areas easier.
Each location is jam-packed with stuff that breaks or reacts to Brynn’s magic. This is the main mechanic borrowed from Breath of the Wild and Eternal Strands pulls off some new tricks with it that make it worthwhile. Harvesting materials from foes changes depending on what magic players use on them.
Burning enemies into a white-hot crisp turns regular leather into tanned leather. Freezing metallic objects makes them brittle for smashing. All wood burns, stone is breakable, and ice will melt in this game. Figuring out how to use all of these effects and properties on foes and boss enemies is the real fun of Eternal Strands.
Discovering you can climb up on top of a dragon and freeze its wings to make it fall when it tries to take off is truly magical. This is where the Monster Hunter influences show because each area will always have one randomly chosen roaming giant enemy. Even if the hunt isn’t part of the objective at hand, it’s always worth going after these behemoths for their parts for crafting and upgrading gear.
There is a decent variety of these giant bosses and while some strategies overlap between them, the encounters are chaotic enough that no two fights will go the same. The battles are an absurd sight to behold since most objects are destructible, the aftermath usually leaves the map looking like a nuke fell on it. Tons of wooden houses and stone structures get rent and patches of flames pepper the land amid glowing molten rock.
Even though it’s made in Unreal Engine 5, Eternal Strands opts for an illustrative art style evocative of League of Legends. It gets the job done but has admittedly become a generic fantasy aesthetic seen in most Western-developed games. At least the big knights with the huge scissors are cool.
The melee and bow combat fail to impress, but they are a means to an end. The real way to engage enemies is by using magic and the environment as a weapon. Getting creative to work around a limited combat system makes Eternal Strands compelling, not guys with a sword over and over.
The story is a waste and doesn’t even have an antagonist, but that won’t stop players from getting in touch with their inner sadists. Sometimes the atmosphere borders on surreal when there is a drought in the area and everything becomes flammable and the music is a slow-paced, moody piece set against Brynn exploring an entire city burning.
Eternal Strands manages to be more than a checklist of influences that market research would appreciate. This is an outrageous action adventure game that leans hard on unbelievable physics to suck the player into its setting. It can be a little hard but every problem can be solved with unconventional thinking.
Eternal Strands was reviewed on an Xbox Series X using a code provided by Yellow Brick Games. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Eternal Strands is now available for PC (via Steam), Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.