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Eternal Strands is a new action RPG that whiffs on the action and offers very little on the RPG. I say that, and yet I cant stop playing it. This game rules.The major selling point of Eternal Strands, the debut game from Yellow Brick Games, is the pedigree of its developers. Directed by Mike Laidlaw (former creative director of BioWares Dragon Age series) and developed by a team that includes Ubisoft veterans, the influence of these hallowed studios is immediately apparent. But Eternal Strands features enough fresh takes on old ideas that its far from yet another Ubisoft Map Game.You play as a woman named Brynn, leading a team of ragtag misfits investigating secrets of a lost civilization. The narrative thrust is at once paint-by-numbers (mysterious cataclysm, magic-user persecution, that sort of thing) and tough to parse. Within minutes, Eternal Strands deploys more proper nouns than a Destiny 2 wiki entry, almost as if it expects you to already know the history underscoring its world. Engaging with the primary cast feels as if youre encroaching on a friend group thats working through some serious shit, and really not in the mood to entertain a casual acquaintance.The result is the urge to skip through all of the dialogue and get to the meat of Eternal Strands: fetch quests. Lots and lots of fetch quests.No, wait, dont go! Yes, fetch quests get a bad rap, but theyre actually interesting in Eternal Strands thanks to the sandbox nature of its world. Main missions and side quests both often task you with leaving your base camp, venturing to one of a handful of biomes, and grabbing a handful of whatever resource your party member needs you to grab. While this may sound rote on paper, the thrill here stems from the fact that you can demolish nearly every object you encounter from typical smashable objects like crates and jars to entire structures, including carriages, houses, and even the stairs you might climb to scale a tower. And the magic system itself actively encourages you to break everything.Flame magic allows you to incinerate vast swaths of the environment, which is a blast, except for when you accidentally immolate those previously mentioned stairs and plummet to your demise. Its more safe instead to lean on the one thing that never gets old in any game: a Force push-style telekinetic power. With it, you can pick up and throw most everything you see, including the wolves, wasps, and ancient robots that constantly try to attack you. You can throw boulders and trees into enemies. You can also hurl enemies off cliffs, into cliffs, over cliffs or you can hurl enemies into other enemies.The largest such enemies are kaiju-sized saurians and automatons. To defeat them, you need to climb up and hack away at their limbs. Eternal Strands lifts its climbing system directly from modern Legend of Zelda games, in that you can climb any surface so long as you have the stamina remaining to do so. Theres a setting in the options menu that purports to make this easier, allowing you to decide whether or not you climb surfaces automatically. When its turned off, its nigh impossible to get a grip on the limb you need to climb. When its turned on, you infallibly climb the one limb you dont want to.Navigating the giant structures in Eternals Strands, whether beast or mountain, is an unpredictable and frustrating exercise thats made somewhat more enjoyable by the existence of an ice spell. You can use this spell to create bridges over gaps that would otherwise kill you, or to create improvisatory structures that pass for stairs in case you keep burning all of the stairs down. (You can also freeze enemies in place, which is a boon, since the general combat is a bit too weightless and imprecise to feel fair without that assist.)But all of your demolition and fetching has a tangible impact on how you power up. You dont earn XP or skill points. Instead, you increase your stats by crafting and recrafting your equipment based on the materials you bring back to camp. So the loop becomes this: Go on a mission, smash a bunch of crates and boxes, kill a bunch of bugs and wolves, and gather as many various crafting components as your inventory allows. The only way you get stronger is by destroying everything you see.Eternals Strands is ultimately what I like to call a Forspokenlike. Forspoken, if youll recall, was a 2023 action RPG developed by Square Enix. It featured a fascinating magic system, but took place in an utterly nonsensical fantasy realm and was pilloried, some might say unfairly, for featuring some groan-worthy dialogue. (Immortals of Aveum is another example of a Forspokenlike. Some readers might call these 7/10 games, a reasonable quip to which I have no retort. Youre not wrong!)For all their flaws, Forspokenlikes are games made by developers trying to present new ideas in an industry that notoriously chases quarterly results at the expense of risk-taking and creativity. And often, the developers of Forspokenlikes bear the brunt of these risks as a result. Luminous Productions, the studio behind Forspoken, closed shortly after the games release. Immortals of Aveum dev Ascendant Studios laid off nearly half its staff after the game missed sales targets. This is a shame. The games industry should be rewarding game makers with fresh ideas, not punishing them.Eternal Strands is the latest game in a microgenre thats definitely not only a thing I just made up. It is baffling and it is imperfect and it is ambitious to a fault, and I am so glad it exists.Eternal Strandswas released Jan. 28 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Xbox Series X using an Xbox Game Pass subscription provided by Microsoft. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can findadditional information about Polygons ethics policy here.
