Game Review - Eternal Strands

Game Review: Eternal Strands by Yellow Brick Games

Score: +4/-18

The core of the game is good, but almost every system falls short of being consistently satisfying and instead tends toward tedious or unreliable. Even the storytelling takes shortcuts, using hand-drawn concept-art-style panels in place of fully produced scenes. The core loop of exploration, combat, and bringing home loot becomes increasingly frustrating because of so many unnecessary time sinks that were not sufficiently enjoyable (time sinks that are enjoyable are completely acceptable).

+1 The graphics look good and have a distinctive style somewhere between realism and the more exaggerated, cartoony look of something like World of Warcraft.

• The environments and giant bosses can look quite impressive.
• However, optimization feels weaker than I would expect considering the stylized graphics and relatively small open-world zones.

+1 The material and crafting system is genuinely interesting.

• Different materials contribute different types of stats, and different pieces of equipment require different mixes of materials.
• This gives gathering some purpose because the material you use actually matters instead of everything simply becoming generic crafting currency.
• Lossless recycling helps enormously because experimenting with equipment does not permanently consume valuable materials.
• Nightingale tried something similar with materials and gear components, but its version became overly complicated while also encouraging fairly obvious damage metas.
• In Eternal Strands, there is more reason to trade raw damage for environmental protection because heat and cold hazards can be extremely irritating if you are not prepared for them.

+1 The story might not be the greatest, but the quests are actually very good.

• RPG quests generally boil down to some combination of fetch quests and kill quests, and Eternal Strands is no different.
• What Eternal Strands does better is present more interesting quests in more interesting ways, often combining intrigue with your emotional investment in the characters. For example, if you have paid attention to Oria talking about her lineage, then when the opportunity arises to find out who her father is, both you and Oria can feel invested in the investigation. Fetching information from different game zones then feels like a necessary part of the investigation rather than an excuse to send the player somewhere to retrieve an object.
• Lazier writing would simply put a boss at the quest target and have the player fight them. That is common in RPGs, and it often makes the quest feel like an inconsequential excuse to trigger a mini-boss fight.
• -0 There is also contextual ambient conversation between NPCs in the camp based on events that have already transpired.
• However, these conversations can sometimes be distant from the player and difficult to hear, or otherwise easy to miss.
• Or two characters far apart are conversing and depending on where you stand one or both will be faint and very hard to hear.
• The non-default Accessibility setting that shows all subtitles can make some of this easier to notice, but once a conversation has been missed, it is missed.
• -0 A lot of the side quests, which technically good, basically amount to daytime soap opera between NPCs. Which leaves the main quest which is actually quite meh and predicable.

+1 Some world systems genuinely change the way you approach the map.

• Weather can affect what preparation you need, how your skills affect the world, and what creatures you can encounter. This means the same map can sometimes have to be handled differently.
• Unfortunately, the creatures themselves are often much less affected by the weather than the player.
  • For example, dangerous conditions such as Flash Freeze or Miasma can be extremely hazardous to the player while many creatures continue behaving normally. Some appropriate creatures may appear during certain weather conditions, but even fire-based creatures such as Spitfires can be unaffected by cold weather that does more damage to the player than their own ice powers do.
• In practice, this can mean simply making one set of gear with adequate cold resistance because Flash Freeze is the most irritating condition.
  • Juggling multiple sets is presumably intended to encourage more resource gathering, but bosses are randomized without weather restrictions, so you can encounter a fire boss during cold weather anyway.
  • A lot of gear therefore ends up feeling less useful than the system initially suggests.

-1 Combat looks like modern responsive action combat, but often does not actually feel responsive enough for the mechanics it asks you to use.

• Combat is generally fine against a single enemy. Once there are two or more enemies, their very high mobility makes encounters much harder to control and disproportionately dangerous.
  • Melee enemies can have very fast and sometimes extremely long-distance gap closers, so trying to disengage and find a more favorable position can be surprisingly difficult even if you simply run.
  • Ranged enemies tend to move extremely quickly as well. They try to flank and find line of sight while also being able to run away when approached. Their accuracy is extremely high even at very long range.
  • A single ranged enemy can often be lured closer by hiding behind terrain. With multiple enemies, you are trying to corner one while the others flank and shoot you.
• This makes terrain extremely important, but the open-world areas are often wide open, especially from the perspective of ranged enemies.
• What begins as exciting action combat can quickly turn into tedious pursuit and crowd management.

-1 Regular fights are not fun. The Spitfire is a good example of an encounter that becomes extremely irritating when there are several enemies.

• These flying insect enemies often appear in pairs or groups.
• Their firebombs have long range, high accuracy, and leave lingering patches of fire on the ground.
• They attack quickly, are highly mobile, and can fly faster than you can run.
• A single Spitfire is manageable. You can break line of sight and wait for it to come closer, then use Ice Wall to exploit its vulnerability to frost and either let the ice kill it or attack it while it is frozen.
• With several Spitfires, however, they can bombard you from different directions while you are trying to deal with one of them.
• The tutorial recommends using a bow, but Spitfires do not take much arrow damage on Normal difficulty.
• Charging a bow shot for more damage leaves you exposed to their firebombs, and any hit interrupts the charge. Rapidly firing arrows at a moving target is unreliable and consumes stamina quickly. Once your stamina is depleted, you have to stop and recover while the Spitfires continue attacking.
• Your arrows have effectively medium range because they arc and there is no aim correction. Despite the circular reticle, shots must be extremely precise. Meanwhile, enemies can apparently calculate projectile trajectories accurately at long range.
• The result is another encounter where the counter exists, but becomes much more difficult to use when the game simply adds another highly mobile enemy.

-1 Archery is barely usable.

• On Normal Difficulty some enemies take no damage at all from normal arrow shots, no matter how strong your bow.
• The circular reticle is misleading. There is no aim correction, so the circle does not give much useful information about where the arrow will actually land.
• You must be extremely precise. One pixel off and the arrow can fly past the target.
• Tab targeting for the bow can miss surprisingly often even against a completely unaware and immobile target. I have repeatedly seen this happen against Arbalest Arks, although it is not clear why.

-1 Blocking also feels questionable.

• It is not always clear whether attacks can be cancelled into a block, which makes blocking much harder to use reactively.
• Perfect blocks require reading an attack and timing the block properly, but that becomes much less practical when several enemies are circling you or shooting from outside your view.
• Holding block can work, but feels pointless against multiple enemies because it is directional and enemies move very quickly to flank.
• The usefulness of perfect blocking against giant bosses is also dubious.
• As a result, trying to engage with the more skill-based defensive mechanic can feel like a disadvantage rather than something the game rewards.

-1 Skills can be fun in theory but become clumsy and irritating once enemies get close.

• Enemies moving sideways even at a moderate pace can simply avoid many targeted skills.
• Tab targeting helps you land skills and spells against a single target, but becomes a liability once several enemies start circling you and you are simultaneously trying to reposition, change targets, or see what is happening.
• The game encourages Ice Wall as crowd control, but actually aiming it at a moving enemy at mid or close range can be surprisingly difficult unless that enemy is already running directly toward you. This seems to be due to a combination of casting delay and being unable to cast directly in front of you.
• Once Ice Wall is placed, it becomes a hazard to you as well.
• If auto-climb is enabled, approaching an enemy trapped in the ice can cause you to climb onto your own wall and start taking freezing damage.

Another example is Drake's Breath.

• It is basically a magical flamethrower, which sounds like it should be extremely useful both in combat and while exploring frozen areas.
• Unfortunately, magically frozen ground can neutralize the fire so quickly that it does not create a useful warm area.
• If you keep using it long enough, you can briefly set the ground on fire instead and start burning yourself before the ice returns.
• In combat it can set enemies on fire, but it can also leave the ground burning afterward so you take damage trying to collect their loot.
• The elemental reaction between fire and ice is interesting but hardly revolutionary. Prey, for example, already used environmental fire and the Gloo Gun in ways that overlap with the fire and Ice Wall interactions here.
• You can use Ice Wall to extinguish the fire, but then you have frozen the ground and can take cold damage while trying to collect the same loot.

-1 Elemental Counters: Some of the game's stated elemental counters are actually worse than ignoring the advice and using cheese tactics.

• The tutorial entry for the common Acala enemy says: "Their thick fur makes them resistant to frost, but ignites easily to flame."
• That strongly suggests fire should be the preferred solution.
• In practice, Ice Wall can still be much safer. Freeze the Acala, accept a little damage from your own ice, and kill it while it cannot retaliate.
• Drake's Breath requires letting it get much closer, takes a while to actually ignite the fur, and leaves you vulnerable to being hit several times while trying to apply the supposedly correct elemental counter. Those enemy hits can cost multiples more health than standing near your own Ice Wall.

The Glacial Slider is an even clearer example.

• Its tutorial entry says: "Coated in a thick shell of frost magic, they are nigh-invulnerable until it is removed. Flame magic to the rescue."
• Except Drake's Breath seems to take forever to remove the protection, if it removes it reliably at all.
• The Glacial Slider can simply walk sideways out of the relatively short-range fire attack.
• It has no useful hit reaction while you are channeling, so it can attack you and interrupt Drake's Breath.
• Its attack also creates a ground AOE which breaks your spell channel, slows you, and inflicts cold damage, making it even harder to maintain the supposedly intended attack.
• It can be easier to find high ground and repeatedly use your very first magic ability, Weaver's Grasp, to fling the enemy around until it dies. Or simply rush it with your two-handed sword.

-1 Weaver's Grasp can become a cheese tactic in many 1v1 encounters.

• Enemies are briefly stunned after landing, so you can sometimes grab them again before they recover and repeat the process.
  • This works best when there is only one enemy because trying to fling one enemy into another, even if it is not moving, is surprisingly difficult when throws can miss despite the reticle being over the target.
  • You can tab-target the enemy, but then you have to change your targeting again to grab something to throw at it.
  • Alternatively, you can throw them into a chasm and accept that you will not get any of the material drops from defeating them.
• Having your first magic ability remain one of the easiest ways to defeat troublesome enemies undermines the fun of discovering new magic powers.
• The game keeps giving you interesting new toys while its combat balance can encourage you to keep using the first one.
• The "best build" guides on YouTube naturally encourage using Weaver's Grasp because the tiresome combat can be shortcut by throwing enemies into a chasm.
  • Yes, it works, but it does so by avoiding combat that simply is not very fun or rewarding.
  • In another game, a "death ray" like this would be ridiculous. Here, it can feel like much-needed relief.

-1 Boss fights are too often about fighting the controls rather than the boss.

• Trying to reposition while clinging to a boss can be surprisingly tedious, even after you figure out that movement is based on the camera rather than your character. If the boss suddenly causes the camera direction to change, the same key you have been holding to move can suddenly send you in a different direction.
• Climbing can also stick you to the wrong body part when you are close to the boss.
• Some bosses, such as Ark of the Forge, have a long and uneventful phase that you need to wait through before the required weak point appears. It is not particularly dangerous, but it is boring because it lasts so long. The newer Ark of the Nova is even worse.
• The final boss type is so tedious to even grab onto that being able to just ignore the correct mechanics feels like something they let the player do because it was too late to redo the whole boss model and adjust a fight that has too many irritating elements.

The very first Ark of the Stricken Earth demonstrates the repositioning problem.

• Its wide headpiece is almost always very close to the location on the shoulder where you need to be to hit the weak spot.
• You can easily stick to the wrong nearby body part and then spend too much time fighting the climbing controls just to get back into position.
• The challenge becomes less about defeating the boss and more about persuading your character to stand where you want.

The open-world boss encounters can create additional problems.

• If the Ashpeak Drake is in Glintwood Hollow, for example, by the time you tediously chase it down after spotting it in the sky, it can be on a high plateau. When you ride it to harvest its Strand, you can be flown higher than the world exploration limit and automatically repositioned off the drake and onto the ground.
• -1 On all maps, after dealing with the boss you typically have to figure out where the boss was roaming while you were hacking off body parts and where the precious high-tier materials fell.
• These can end up in inaccessible areas because of chasms and hazard zones within the explorable area.
• For flying bosses especially, this is very irritating because they can fly great distances during the fight. You were probably not paying attention to exactly where they were going because the camera angle while climbing does not make it easy to track the surrounding environment.
• A flying boss can literally fall entirely into a chasm when you defeat it with the "Harvest Strand" maneuver, take you with it, and of course any loot it drops is down there in the inaccessible area.

-1 The Brennig Glasstail demonstrates how poorly communicated some of the boss-part mechanics can be.

• The game tells you to burn the Glasstail's mane off, but the mane itself cannot actually be targeted. Shots pass straight through it.
• Instead, the apparent mechanic is that you damage the head until it "breaks," at which point the mane is removed. Blue cracks appearing on the head seem to indicate this process.
• This is different from other giant bosses where a particular body part can be targeted and cleanly broken away.
• It is also unclear whether the head-break state specifically requires fire damage or simply enough damage to the head. Players have apparently been using the Flame Bow, while Drake's Breath does not make the intended solution particularly obvious.
• That is especially confusing because Drake's Breath seems more effective than a fire arrow for actually setting zones on fire. It is also a sustained flamethrower rather than a brief fire shot.
• The player therefore has to reverse-engineer the particular mechanic the game expects rather than simply following the instruction to burn off the mane.
• This is particularly frustrating because targeting and dismantling specific body parts is supposed to be one of the game's signature systems and the only way to get skill upgrades.
• If a game wants you to climb around giant monsters and surgically attack particular pieces of anatomy, the climbing controls and hit detection need to be unusually good. Here they often are not.

-1 Harder difficulty can feel like it is throttling progression rather than rewarding skill.

• The monsters drop materials you actually want to keep, so defeating them should be an important part of gathering and progression.
• However, most monsters drop low-grade materials you might never use, and there are a lot of them scattered across the maps.
• In later maps, enemies can start dropping higher-grade materials, which makes accumulating resources feel more meaningful, but your inventory is constantly too limited and you eventually have to throw away increasingly valuable resource tiers.
• There is no good reason for this to work like a live-service extraction game where limited inventory exists to force you to decide what to bring home. Each exploration phase is unlimited anyway, since you can keep jumping to different zones until you return to base.
• An intermediate solution could have been automatically unloading your loot whenever you reach a Fast Travel point.
• Instead, the limited inventory mostly makes deep exploration increasingly unrewarding and discourages engaging with resources such as treasure chests.
• When the combat mechanics are already tedious, making enemies harder does not necessarily create a more satisfying skill challenge. It can simply make collecting those materials slower and more expensive in time and healing resources.
• This is especially noticeable when encounters involve several highly mobile enemies because the player has relatively poor tools for preventing themselves from being surrounded.

-1 After an encounter, the next part of exploration can become searching for replacement Vitality Tonics.

• You can only carry a limited number of healing potions.
• They are not desperately uncommon, but you may have to trek back through the environment trying to remember where you previously left one behind.
• An irritating fight that was unavoidable but also pointless because the enemies did not drop anything you wanted to keep can therefore be followed by an equally uninteresting recovery phase where you retrace your route just to restore the resources consumed by the encounter.
• An easy fix would have been to allow the player to collect the potions but only replenish the belt's quick-use slots outside of combat.
• Fortunately, there is "Story Mode" difficulty to save you from having to find a cheat just to save time and get on with the game.
• Or you can use the exploit of jumping into a chasm and being automatically repositioned because you went out of bounds, with your health fully restored.

-1 Exploration is either lacklustre or irritating.

• Initially there are an excess of breakable crates, but mostly they give junk and your inventory is limited anyway.
  • So even the excitement of finding treasure is diminished by the sharply limited inventory. Once that wears thin, the remaining major points of interest are lore objects, if you are interested in them.
  • On the other hand, the game may be pushing you to fight bosses repeatedly and collect only their gold and purple resources because those are ultimately the ones that provide the best-in-slot materials and everything else becomes junk. But that still is not a good reason to limit what the player can collect. It simply creates irritation without a clear benefit.
• Later on there are an excess of higher-tier materials from fighting enemies and your inventory starts limiting exploration because you may be forced to drop useful resources to make room.
• Most resources eventually become obsolete because there are better ones. Remembering which materials are actually useful can be a chore, especially since you do not see their stats until you are at the blacksmith composing gear.
• Chests are sprinkled about, but often feel like a more reliable way of finding slightly better junk, usually green-grade material. Some chests are better but do not respawn regularly, or never respawn at all. An in-game way to mark locations would have helped considerably with finding useful chests again, at least for the early to mid game.
• Some of the materials you really want are difficult to farm except from giant bosses, and even that can be somewhat random because not all bosses are available in the world and some zones have irritating weather conditions.
• There may be several materials that look like possible "best in slot" choices, but you ultimately want to use only a handful. Once you figure out which ones they are, farming them can be tedious. That would at least be a more enjoyable grind if combat were more enjoyable to repeat.
• Meanwhile, simply moving around the map means encountering unrewarding but time- and potentially resource-consuming fights around every corner.
• Near the end of the game, you can trade junk materials for the best materials available.
• I suspect this is meant to solve two problems at once: all those lower-tier materials that have become obsolete finally have a use, and players have a way to obtain high-tier materials without repeatedly grinding the same bosses. Those are both reasonable ideas.
• The problem is that the trading system can bypass too much of the game rather than complementing it.  Once it is unlocked, you can visit an easy area, collect whatever happens to be lying around, and just go shopping for the materials you actually want. That is certainly more convenient than farming bosses, but it also makes the boss-material loop feel like something to escape rather than something worth repeating.
• The system also appears to make the earlier inventory limitation sensible since you can't immediately convert all your junk into the best materials. But nothing stops you from collecting junk now to trade for boss drops.
• A better solution would have been to make the activities being bypassed more enjoyable and rewarding to repeat.
• The trading system also fixes some of the economy's friction, but arriving so late means you have already spent most of the game dealing with that friction, while its ability to bypass boss farming makes the underlying endgame loop feel even less worthwhile.
• This feels like a band-aid for an endgame economy problem, perhaps intended to deal with obsolete materials and reduce the grind for best-in-slot resources. As a safety valve, it works. But it also lets players bypass so much of the intended material and boss loop that it raises the more fundamental question of why those activities weren't made more enjoyable to repeat in the first place.

-1 Lore and exploration rewards are often placed in ways that feel artificial.

• You can explore for lore entries ("Codex Entries"), but quite a number are in highly implausible locations, such as letters and missives sitting on top of domed roofs.
• -0 You also need basically a minor spoiler to tell you that some lores only appear during certain quests and are impossible to acquire otherwise; because the counter on the map just shows how many are missing.
• Fortunately, at the very, very, end of the game when you've completed all quests, you get a quest to find the remaining Codex Entries and you can now use the extremely primitive quest tracker that just points you in the correct direction, straight through impenetrable barriers.
• It is bad enough that games nowadays sprinkle treasure chests throughout improbable corners of the map as incentives to explore. Lore objects should at least be in lore-probable locations.
  • This excludes the Easter-egg "gold bricks" containing developer names, which are presumably intentionally placed in hard-to-find locations and do not pretend to be part of the world's lore.

-1 The game actively discourages you from exploring its world.

• The more extensively you explore, the more loot you have to leave behind, and eventually you have to drop higher tiers of loot because you simply do not have enough inventory space.
  • You can of course return to camp to dump the inventory, but you cannot simply "resume exploring" because all the tedious trash mobs respawn every time you return to camp.
• Finding new areas unlocks new bosses, and bosses can provide new skills. You are therefore passively encouraged to rush through areas looking for the transition to the next zone.
• That creates an odd incentive structure where exploring the world can immediately introduce encounters you may not yet be equipped or upgraded to handle comfortably.
• Similarly, camp upgrades are tied to the main story, so deviating too long from the main story holds you back from things such as increased inventory space.
• Instead of exploration naturally feeding back into progression, the player can feel encouraged to find bosses and advance the main story first and come back later. This severely devalues side quests.

-1 Climbing is terrible.

• Mostly it works, but sometimes it behaves unpredictably, such as suddenly letting go when at other times you can climb under overhangs like Spider-Man.
• Starting a climb at a ledge to climb down may fail to work or cause you to let go.
• Jumping while climbing either gets you higher, mostly, or sometimes bounces you off.
• This would be merely annoying during normal exploration, but the same climbing system is also central to the giant-boss fights.

-1 The presentation sometimes looks like development shortcuts rather than deliberate stylistic choices.

• Despite having attractive 3D environments and character models, some story sequences switch to almost hand-drawn illustrated panels.
• These may be intentionally stylized, but they can look like concept-art panels or storyboards used in place of fully produced cutscenes.
• Regular dialogue also uses 2D visual-novel-style character portraits rather than the existing 3D character models.
• The contrast is jarring because the game has already established a fairly attractive 3D visual style, so switching to static illustrated panels can make those scenes feel unfinished or budget-driven.

-1 The game does not always remember minor settings that should simply stay remembered.

• Compass preferences are not saved.
• I have also seen difficulty settings revert.
• This sounds minor, but precisely because these are minor settings, the game should simply remember them when you set them.

Eternal Strands has some genuinely interesting systems. The problem is that many of those systems sound more entertaining than the actual implementation.