The story Eternal Strands tells is pretty good.
You know, and then trying to find out what went wrong.
Eternal Strands review
All excellent stuff, and I really like it a lot.
Both of these snippets of information deepened the feelings I have for Eternal Strands quite significantly.
And both of them came from loading screen tool tips.
Surely, the story is where you begin with a Laidlaw joint.
Not so sure, actually.
It’s a riot.
It’s explosive and silly, often brilliant and frequently hilarious.
Each of these powers forms a strand that can be woven into your toolset and strengthened.
That’s until I stepped back and realised that I was approaching it all wrong.
Eternal Strands' environments are lush and detailed, and we’ll get to them properly in a moment.
Stuff you’re able to set on fire.
Stuff that might freeze in interesting ways.
I would freeze a foe in place and then lob rocks at them.
I would make a foe heavy but slippy with ice and push them off something.
I would place little kinetic bombs that would implode and set off any nearby barrels of magical napalm.
I also used these powers while navigating the environment.
Vines blocking a wall?
Chuck a bomb at them and try not to set yourself on fire.
This, it turns out, is something Eternal Strands doesn’t attempt to avoid.
Also, you might learn something through exploding yourself in a novel way.
It feels like magic should feel: dangerous, uncontrollable and scary.
It’s a neat system, and feels a bit like tweaking recipes when cooking.
But in terms of levelling up magic and gaining new abilities, Eternal Strands deploys a really big idea.
Each creature is distinct and memorable in its own ways.
Levels are vast and studded with different areas to uncover.
You have tumble-down cities, caves, mountain crags, castles and defences, forests and marshes.
I’ll admit: sprinkled throughout all this are a handful of things I found slightly annoying.
I never found basic enemies that interesting in terms of their combat design, although they always looked great.
Eternal Strands accessibility options
Options to change subtitle size and background.
Colour-blindness options for deuteranope, protanope and tritanope, and parameters to adjust severity of colour-blindness displays.
But crucially I understand all of this.
c’mon know, then: this is a game made of sheer pluck and ingenuity.
I would love to see what a sequel looks like.
A copy of Eternal Strands was provided for review by developer Yellow Brick Games.
