Eternal Strands

Written by Joseph Moorer on 2/14/2025 for PS5  

Third person action adventure games are not hard to find. So much so that commonalities emerge in the genre; look hard enough and you're bound to find some of the same elements in all of them. Protagonists with a basic idea of what's going on is mostly a given. It's their first adventure, and it's up to them to become the hero they're destined to be. The main antagonist is similar too. It used it's ultimate power to destroy something, and the protagonist THEN used a magical something to stop it, right before they died. Weapons, item recovery, magic, you name it. It's always a thing. Yellow Brick Games stuck to some of these tropes for their game Eternal Strands, because if it ain't broke, don't fix it. You just have to do a WHOLE lot of stuff to fix it. 

After all that set up, its story time. There used to be a place called the Enclave. It was where magic users, or Weavers, lived and thrived, without interference or turmoil. They built their own community, constructs, and innovation. Huge monstrosities called Arkanes, or Arks for short, started to wreak havoc on the Enclave, and in order for the weavers to get out, the Enclave was surrounded by a Veil. The Weavers that lived outside the enclave were shunned after wars broke out and they couldn't protect the world leaders. Brynn is one of the Weavers in a weaverband, headed to the Veil. There's a safe zone to build camp, and you, as Brynn, will go out and get a lay of the land. This is the first of many. And yes, you can skip through the dialogue. I did this a lot.

The game opens with a tutorial. You have your basic movement, and free camera movement. You can look at, and pick up things with a button. And yes, you have to push the button to pick up things every time. You have a sword, which produces a three hit combo, and if she holds the button, does a more powerful attack. Brynn can sprint and climb as well, like Link from Breath of the Wild. Sprinting, climbing and fighting all use your stamina meter, and if that runs out, you cannot defend yourself, nor get maximum damage when you swing. She can also take fall damage. It's an action adventure. These things work. I'm in. 

Brynn also has something called a Strand. The Strand starts you off with the Weaver's Grasp, and you can pick up rocks and other pieces off the environment, and throw it at enemies. You can also pick up enemies, and throw them off the screen. This is a super cool mechanic that I want more of. So now I'm really interested. Later on, you find out that your strand also has ice powers, and can cool down anything on fire. It can even ensnare enemies, so you can whale on them whenever you want. This helps with the whole stamina thing, and is a nice alternative to fighting. If you do throw someone off the screen, you don't get their drops. A downside I took quite often.

You also cannot just roam around where ever you want. The maps are pretty huge, but two things stop you from being the ultimate Dora the Explorer. One is something called Coral. It damages you when you touch it, and the pits you fall in are full of it. Stay away from the teal green purple stuff. The other is the "Scry" limit, indicated by a gold tint. The people in your weaverband can't communicate with you, nor help you on your journeys if they cannot see you. If you do go beyond the scry, you are pulled back and reset. Don't die, abide the scry. But if you do die, it's ok. The weaverband will again pull you back to your entry point, and you can only keep some of the materials you've collected. 

Visually, Eternal Strands is gorgeous. It's not something you need a PS5 Pro for, but it is gorgeous. The enemies aren't much for variation, but sometimes I would just be able to run through, and throw them off a cliff, and keep moving. Some have ranged attacks, and camouflage attacks, that you never see coming. It's not because they're smart. It is because you're running along, and out of nowhere, an animal smacks you from behind. Sure, you can fight these guys to your hearts content, but once you upgrade that strand to pick up bigger enemies, it won't matter. You can get all your drops from barrels, and bags. Keep your vitality drops on the ready. You will need them.

The materials are something you will eventually use to craft and upgrade your weapons, armor, and eventually create quest items. Words of wisdom - collect everything you can. All of it. The only way you will want to drop something is if you see something better. All items are color coded. The gold, blue, green, red, and brown, from top to bottom. This is one of the first unfortunate parts of the game. You will be able to upgrade your camp, so your camp will be able to upgrade your weapons and armor, but the game doesn't let you do this, until you "finish more of the story." It hinders you on purpose. I get why it wouldn't let you become over powered, but later on in the game, you're TOO UNDERPOWERED to finish it. This is my first of many frustrations. 

Brynn is a errand person. I hate to put it like this, but Brynn's time in the camp is short lived. Trying to weave your way through the story is only done by completing fetch quests for items that matter only half the time. They do lead to different schematics for weapons, but I was only able to find 4 variations of my sword and shield, and it just seemed like every time I went back to camp, I had to go hunt for another piece of paper, only to bring it back, and be told that they also need ANOTHER piece of paper. There are main quests and companion quests. Both are just as frustrating, as I just wanted to go and find this stuff on my own. You can follow the quest via your menu, and even use a wisp to direct you where to go, something I completely forgot about mid game. Why are there so many? Why?

Go get this thing to upgrade your weapons, but you can't upgrade your weapons, because you didn't upgrade your camp first, and you can't upgrade your camp because you need more of the story, but you can't progress in the story, because you can't upgrade your weapons. Now when you figure it all out, you're not powerful enough to complete the story, because all the things we told you to upgrade, you couldn't. WHY?! Why does the game hold your hand, while holding you back, and then tell you to become more powerful toward the end? You're not my mom, game!  

The epic quests are where the game "strands" out. These are where you go and fight the Arks and epic beasts, and the Arks are larger than life, a la, shadow of the colossus. You are told which beast is available for you to fight, but it's kind of cool that you can hear them stomping or flapping and shrieking in the distance. You can climb these giants and chip away at their vulnerable parts until they harden, making you find another part. You can chip away at armor, weigh down wings with the ice powers, and even set things on fire with your fire powers eventually added to the strand. These are elemental arks, too, and all of them represent a different power up for the strand. They have their own attacks, and will even try to shake you off of them, or grab you and squeeze you for a powerful attack. When you fight them the first time, you automatically get the strand upgrade. It's the next battles that become a little much. 

All of the arks or beasts have a locus point. A locus point is where they draw their powers from. In order to power up your strand's new powers, you must harvest them from these locus points. The locus points, easy to find on the first ark, are much harder to find on the others. I had to clip the wings, and cut down the horns of one beast, and then the locus point only appeared when it was carrying me high up in the air. If you go for the locus point, before you take the monster's HP down, it will throw you off of it. If you kill it BEFORE you harvest it, you're rewarded with drops, but you don't get a strand. Your weaverband will remind you of this every time. Every. Single. Time. The Arks and epic beasts are never in the same place, either. Look to your journal to have an easier time finding the locus point, for you'll have to fight each enemy thrice to get full upgrades, if you've completed more of the story.  

Once you unlock your first loomgate, which is what you will use to travel, you can go different points of the Enclave. As you explore more, you'll unlock more drop in parts. The journal tells you exactly where to go for your 20th fetch quest this session, and some of these you can only do at night. There's also different weather patterns for each map, so if you're looking for something, and you don't want to go during a drought, or you can't go because of a Miasma, you just have to camp out and wait for the weather to change. The miasma, is when the entire world is covered in Coral, the purple teal stuff mentioned earlier. Yes, your quests will ask you to find something in that particular map during a miasma. Just wait. It's not worth it. You can travel in the morning, afternoon, or at night. At any time, if you are in a jam, you can teleport out with all your items, and live to fight another afternoon. 

The cool thing about the weather is that sometimes elemental enemies can be affected by it too. This also goes for the environments. You can set something completely on fire, and an enemy will be set ablaze if it steps foot in it. Be aware that some enemies absorb that and use it against you. Why the Ice Ark didn't seem too phased by the droughts, you are directly effected if it's too cold. You do have a potion to help you withstand extreme temperatures. You start off with one per run, and those are refilled, with your vitality tonics, if you successfully make it back to camp. If you die, you start at the loomgate you came through, with some of your items, and none of your resources refilled. Keep that in mind. It's ok to run. You can't do anything anyway. The game doesn't want you to. 

The days don't matter. There's a day counter, and I never found a reason for them to matter. The conversations with the weaverbands and the NPC's don't matter. It became a skippable knot, and I just stopped caring a quarter of the way through. When you break things, HP points fly out? Why do I need to know how much HP a rock has before I smash it? There are SO MANY QUESTS, and they're necessary for you to progress, though you just find out that someone has been behind this the entire time. The relationships you build are yours to answer in a series of choices during conversations, but they don't change the outcome of the game.

Crafting AND upgrading become confusing, which then leads to a third option. Why is reforging a thing, when crafting and upgrading are right there? All the elemental cool stuff gets lost in this mundane experience that I just wanted it to end. The game has so much potential. A few platforming glitches here and there, but they're passable. It is bogged down by fetch quests and errands. At least the end boss fight is pretty cool. There's a harder difficulty, and things to do after the endgame, but once I rolled credits after 40 hours, it became one and done. It's a cool game, just bogged down and slowed down for absolutely no reason.