Review - Eternal Strands

I first heard about Eternal Strands just a few weeks before launch when they announced the demo, the first hour or so of the game, would carry progress into the full release - we can call that an early win for consumer-friendly business already. Looking into it a bit, I saw it was the first game from Mike Laidlaw's (formerly Bioware) new studio and I'll admit that this biased me towards it a bit.

Since Bioware started its weird splintering and collapse about 10 years go, we've seen the quality and general "vision" of their games deteriorate - Andromeda was extremely messy and half-baked creatively, Anthem was a bland disaster, and with Veilguard it became clear that this wasn't just a rough patch, but a complete implosion of quality from a writing and indescribable vibes perspective. Seeing their old guard writing leadership leave created this weird opportunity to watch them all do their own thing and get an insight into who's departure was "to blame" for this decline - who can still make a game without EA money? *

So yeah I see Laidlaw's making a game, lead designer and creative director on the first couple of Dragon Age games, so this is a chance to see if it was just "good writers" or an environment that lets good writers thrive - this is a really interesting test-case. I then see that it's a relatively small AA-scale game and that it'll cost £33 at launch - this is insane to me, I've gotta give this a look.

Already committed intellectually I played the demo anyway to figure out how soon I wanted to play it - and it was like getting hit in the face with my dream game.

Eternal Strands is set in the Mayda Basin, a fantasy continent made up of several conflicting and cooperating territories containing a handful of different humanoid species. Magic is performed by people called Weavers, who are in the current day ostracised due to a disaster 50 years ago in which all magic basically exploded, and the political home of Weavers - a state called The Enclave - locked itself behind a magical Veil. Brynn is the newest member of a travelling band of weavers investigating a possible entry into the Enclave, which would be the first since the veil went up.

To do the very quick summary of what it is as a game, it's a semi-open-world action adventure game with combat mechanics focusing on a physics-based magic system, climbable bosses and environments, and a gathering/extraction/crafting mechanic. It's also heavily built around dialogue in an RPG style, but without the consequences for your choices you'd expect from a company like Bioware - your dialogue choices characterise the player character, not the outcomes.

In practice a lot of this ends up a bit janky, especially in the early game while I was still finding my feet with the physics system, and throughout the early game I was reminded of the PS2 era where off-budget games exploring unusual gameplay mechanics were much more the norm. It brought to mind games like 2004's Second Sight by Free Radical, a game which existed almost exclusively in bargain-buckets at my local Gamestation but which holds a very special place in my heart. **

I played Strands pretty leisurely over a week and a half, finishing it in a sprint of about 10 hours last weekend because it had me totally hooked. All the mechanics really clicked together, the story had my attention, and I was really enjoying the characters and new areas I'd unlocked. Despite the tranche of words above, I'm not going to go into great detail here on the game's specifics - I'm planning to write a bit more about those things in dedicated posts.

Suffice to say that I have almost exclusively praise for Eternal Strands. Where it fails to excel it succeeds in sufficiency - there are definite lows to go with the highs, but they feel like choices and compromises for the sake of the collective vision.

The visuals are really lovely - extremely Fortnitey in that "that's what Unreal Engine's made for" kind of way, but characterful with it and well optimised to the scale of game being presented - the edges of the map are consciously artificial ("a bubble of safety" for the protagonist's explorations), but they do a great job of keeping the out of bounds area lush with detail and landmarks. Dialogue occurs between 2D avatars like a visual novel, and this is a clearly economical choice - but also a very characterful one I think? It really worked for me, regardless.

It's hard to escape the knowledge of Bioware's DNA in this team though - "the veil", magical living rock, poison in the earth, and extremely geth-coded constructs (as well as some late game stuff I won't go into) all paint a picture of a team working through ideas still lingering in their minds. It's not in itself a problem, but in the introduction it does feel as thought they could have worked harder filing the serial numbers off this particular boilerplate.

The gameplay is really what makes Eternal Strands shine in my view. You start off finding great satisfaction throwing little fire flowers at enemies to kill them instantly or tentatively freezing a path through a raging fire, in the midgame temperature swings are entirely in your control and you can confidently sling enemies out of your way to get from A to B, and by the endgame you will be, if you so desire, hurtling yourself around the map at 100mph and paying no heed to your surroundings. The pacing plays so nicely with the mechanics, making backtracking stay interesting as the areas develop along with your toolkit for dealing with them.

The magic system really does deliver on the promise my nostalgia-ridden heart made to me - there are only 9 "spells" to choose from but by the time I'd unlocked 6 I was unsure what more ground they could cover - of the last three, two were both hilarious and extremely useful to me in clearing the lategame quests. The bosses remain fun into the endgame as you figure out new and better ways to undermine them, or in some cases give up on being clever and just tear them to pieces. In Eternal Strands, the numbers don't go up by a massive amount, but the ability to affect the world is exponential.

The resource/crafting stuff is possibly the biggest risk the game takes - you have a limited inventory, and lose resources on death, so the potential for frustration is high. It took me longer than I'd like to realise that the intended response to this is to do lots of small focused excursions, then deaths are less impactful and, narratively, Brynn gets plenty of rest. But it interacts with another much lighter system - there are 3 times of day (morning, afternoon, night) and each excursion uses up one of them. The game keeps track of the days and mixes things up between day and night, but really none of it matters. But there was a number going up, and I could make it go up slower - learning to not care and let it rise was a real lightbulb moment for me coming to love Eternal Strands.

The weaver band Brynn is a part of is a particularly charming part of the experience for me. It was just really refreshing to get so much done with my in-game friends in a (by modern RPG standards) very short game at <30 hours. They interact with each other in ways that feel real and they respond to dialogue choices in ways that are, while entirely superficial, incredibly satisfying as the player. At one point I made a rousing speech, and rather than just say "nice speech" a character kept repeating a particular line Brynn said, both highlighting the choice we made while also telling us what resonated with them specifically. I don't know, it feels like such a trivial bit of writing but it embedded me in the story - stuff like that is what's going to stick with me weeks, months, years later when I think about this game, more than any approval meter I've ever filled in the past.

The overall story is really solid - well paced, nice rising and falling tension, some fun non-weaverband characters with their own priorities, and a really great "mannnn, fuck this guy" antagonist. I don't want to talk about it too much here, but a good amount of time is spent establishing motivations, good or ill, and letting the player talk to various actors about what matters to them. It felt complete.

And that's the real feeling I had walking away from Eternal Strands - it's a complete experience. They explore their mechanics fully, tell a well rounded story, and don't leave much on the table. I'm sure they could come up with a sequel if they wanted, but they didn't purposely leave massive narrative gaps to be filled in case it sold well enough to justify more games. The setting is pretty fertile though, with lots of room to work with there - the story takes place in a very small area of what is a very rich cultural and political landscape, something I'd be really keen to see them explore more with an expanded - or focused - version of the same mechanics.

I said earlier Eternal Strands put me in mind of Second Sight, but it also makes me think of Mass Effect 2 - a game that was so good at telling a story that it got a whole generation of turn-based narrative RPG fans into a third-person action shooter franchise. I feel like pitching Eternal Strands on the physicsy combat or breezy traversal would be a problem for that audience, but the storytelling really gets to flourish here in a way that I'd hope draws that same audience.

We need more games like Eternal Strands. It takes a little while to get going, but never bores - I stopped sessions because I was done for the day, and then was looking forward to starting it up again tomorrow. I enjoyed wandering around camp talking to my party as much as I enjoyed climbing colossi and yeeting myself and others across the sky.

I wholeheartedly recommend Eternal Strands.

* Please understand I'm being facetious about blame here - any such problems are Bioware/EA's fault, and leaving that company seems to have been a universally good idea. ↩︎

** And the hearts of many others apparently - there's a steam port with 80% positive reviews, and the 20% negative one are almost exclusively "what a shitty port of a great game." ↩︎